Authorities investigating the truck driver who killed 84 people in a Bastille Day attack painted a complex picture Monday of a man who did not seem devout but had recently become interested in jihadi violence and researched past attacks in France and the United States, including one on a gay nightclub in Orlando.
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The reports say Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove through the seafront promenade area of the French city on Tuesday and Wednesday in preparation.
President of the region Christian Estrosi said 77 people were killed, with many others in “critical” condition.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said only 35 bodies have been definitively identified so far. Touraine, the health minister, urged any survivors to seek counselling offered by the government. Garino said the woman, the mother of Bouhlel’s three children, had not been in contact with the attacker since they were in the middle of divorce proceedings.
She has now reportedly been released.
Dr. Raj Persaud, a consultant psychiatrist and professor at London’s Gresham College, said Bouhlel’s path toward violent extremism might have been longer than people around him noticed.
At least two of the three people detained Sunday are suspected of helping Bouhlel obtain the pistol found in the truck, the official said.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve hit back Monday, listing a series of laws and extra police forces created under Hollande’s presidency “to face a threat that France was not prepared for” when he took over from Sarkozy in 2012.
The authorities on Sunday said Bouhlel, described by family and neighbours as a loner who struggled with mental illness, had sent a text message to another suspected accomplice saying: “Bring more weapons”.
It “resolves nothing” but “reassures people”, Georges Fenech, the right-wing deputy who led a parliamentary inquiry into last year’s attacks, said after the Nice atrocity.
French police secure the area as the investigation continues at the scene near the truck that ran into a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, France, July 15, 2016.
The Islamic State group on Saturday claimed the attack was carried out by one of its “soldiers” inspired by its calls for civilians to be targeted, though it didn’t name Lahouaiej-Bouhlel in its statement. The IS said he was following their calls to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists. His father, in Tunisia, said his son did not pray or fast for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. But Valls told the newspaper the Journal du Dimanche in an interview Sunday that the extremist group “is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks”.
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But the mood wasn’t just a sombre one – Prime Minister Manuel Valls was booed on arrival in Nice by some members of the crowd (see video below). Memorials have been set up on the westbound lane of the road where victims were struck, some still identifiable by bloodstains.
