French officials rushed to defend the government’s security measures Thursday even as the country’s interior minister acknowledged national police were not, as he had claimed before, stationed at the entrance to closed-off Nice boulevard during the Bastille Day truck attack that killed 84 people.
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The names of the victims were listed on two black banners hung outside the building late yesterday.
The five suspects were arrested in France after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel rammed a truck into a crowd which enjoyed a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people and injuring more than 300, AFP reported on Friday.
The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation said Thursday July 21, 2016 that it raised almost $45 million at a celebrity-filled auction gala Wednesday night in Saint Tropez for environmental action, but is donating a portion to a French anti-terrorism charity in the light of last week’s attacks.
It also emerged that one of the five suspects in custody, a Tunisian named Mohamed Oualid G., 40, had filmed the scene shortly after the carnage, as it crawled with paramedics and journalists. They were expected to file preliminary charges against the suspects.
Those detained are four men: Ramzi A. and Mohamaed Pualid G. who identified as Franco-Tunisians, Chokri C. who is identified as Tunisian, and an Albanian, Artan. In Nice, investigators found a Kalashnikov rifle and a bag of ammunition in the basement of 22-year-old suspect Ramzi A, who is among the five being held.
Ramzi and the Albanian couple faced a second charge, of breaking the law on firearms in relation to a terrorist crime.
Molins said photos on his phone showed he had likely staked out the event in 2015, and initial details of the investigation reveal he had been fascinated with jihad for some time.
Bouhlel was shot dead by police during the rampage.
Hollande said Cazeneuve, who has shrugged off opposition calls to resign, had his “full confidence” and announced he would ship weapons to Iraqi forces fighting the Islamic State (IS) group which claimed the attack.
According Molins, Bouhlel could have been preparing for this as early as May 2015, as a photo on his phone taken on May 25, 2015 was a snap of an article on Captagon, a drug used by jihadis prior to executing their attacks.
Isil has claimed responsibility for the attack, though authorities have said they had not found signs that the extremist group directed it.
Bouhlel and a 30-year-old French-Tunisian with no previous convictions had phoned each other 1,278 times in a year, Molins said.
A source in the Paris prosecutor’s office, which is leading the investigation into the attack, told AFP the police aimed to prevent dissemination of the “profoundly shocking” images.
Officials had previously suggested that Bouhlel, who until recently drank alcohol, ate pork, danced salsa and had an “unbridled sex life” with men and women, had been radicalised in a matter of days or weeks.
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The paper said police and prosecutors wanted footage of the attack destroyed to preserve the dignity of victims and so it could not be used by jihadists for propaganda purposes.
