Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31 year-old delivery driver, Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any actual links to Islamic State.
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French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve on Saturday called on young citizens to become reservists and help boost security forces in the wake of the country’s latest terror attack.
IS also claimed responsibility for the November 13 attacks which killed 130 people in Paris, while gunmen in January 2015 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo weekly and a Jewish supermarket were linked to both IS and al Qaeda.
The arrests concerned the attacker’s “close entourage”, the sources said, and were made in two different areas of Nice. But the statement quoting a security member of the group said the man was following calls from IS to target nationals of countries fighting it.
From the Nice seashore to the seat of French politics in Paris, critics lashed out Saturday at President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government, asking how a country still under a state of emergency after previous carnage from Islamic extremist attacks could have let this happen again. “I have been looking for him for 48 hours”, he told AFP.
Most said they felt it was right to reopen the promenade so soon after the attack.
Carlo Marnini said he had driven all the way from Milan, Italy, to pay his respects to a city he has vacationed in for years.
Valls defended France’s record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years and said the group’s modus operandi of cajoling unstable people into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible was hard to combat.
France on Saturday began three days of national mourning in homage to the victims – although that didn’t stop politicians from sniping at each other over who bore responsibility for the failing to stop the attack. He was killed by police after ramming his truck through crowds on Nice’s famed seafront after a holiday fireworks display Thursday night.
But Cazeneuve said that high security had been assured in the region – including at the Cannes Film Festival and the Nice Carnival.
Valls has said there were no failures, although Cazeneuve acknowledged on Saturday that the truck had avoided the police vehicles blocking the way to the promenade by mounting a kerb.
An Islamic State-run media outlet says the man who drove his truck into a crowd in the French coastal city of Nice is a “soldier” of the group.
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The identities of most of those brought into custody were not clear. But neighbors in the Nice neighborhood where the Bouhlel used to live told The Associated Press his estranged wife had been taken away by police on Friday.
