Cazeneuve said Thursday that only local police, who are more lightly armed, were guarding the entrance to the Promenade des Anglais when Bouhlel drove his truck down it. Cazeneuve then launched an internal police investigation into the handling of the Nice attack.
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French officials defended the government’s security measures in Nice on the night of the attack, even as the interior minister acknowledged that national police were not, as he had claimed before, stationed at the entrance to the closed-off boulevard. Earlier this year, he was given a six-month suspension by a Nice court after attacking another driver with a wooden pallet in a fit of road rage.
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“Each time he had a crisis, we took him to the doctor who gave him medication”, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel told BFM television. Bouhlel’s estranged wife remains in police custody.
Cazeneuve told RTL France that while ISIS has claimed responsibility for last week’s truck rampage, which he called an attack “of a terrorist nature”, it remained to be seen exactly how the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was connected to the Iraq and Syria-based jihadist group.
An investigation is still ascertaining whether the attacker was working alone or in a group.
The third major attack on France in less than two years has plunged the country back into a state of grief and fear.
Pradal said the attack in Nice, which follows two mass killings by Islamic extremists in Paris past year, shows that his city represents a particular target for extremists because of its long history as a Mediterranean melting pot that is tolerant of all nationalities and religions.
Many family members have been frustrated by a lack of information about their missing loved ones.
On Saturday, an ISIS source told Amaq, a news service closely associated with the group’s leadership, that the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was a “soldier” who acted with inspiration by the group. Many of them are reported to have become increasingly worn out over the months of the operation.
The Islamic State statement said Bouhlel was following their calls to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists, but it’s unclear whether he had concrete links to the group.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it is “continuing to work to establish contact with a small number of individuals with whom contact has not yet been made, but the Department has no reason to believe that any of these have been caught up in the incident”.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s father said he had suffered from depression and had “no links” to religion. Prosecutor Francois Molins said Bouhlel was “completely unknown” and was not on the terrorism radar.
Health Minister Marisol Touraine urged any survivors to seek counseling offered by the government after the Bastille Day attack Thursday night that killed 84 people. The security measure had been in place since the November 13 Paris attacks that killed 130 victims and were claimed by the Islamic State group. He made similar statements after attacks in January 2015 at a kosher supermarket in Paris and the Charlie Hebdo newspaper that killed 17, and again after the November 13 attacks in Paris on a rock concert, the national stadium and cafes that killed 130.
“He had some hard times, I took him to a psychiatrist, he took his treatments and he said he had a serious mental illness”.
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Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said a special terrorism vigilance force created after the 2015 attacks will be extended through the summer, with more deployments outside Paris and more attention to tourist sites and crowded events.
