The 31-year-old Tunisian who killed 84 people by driving a truck through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice on Thursday spent years seeing psychologists before leaving Tunisia for France in 2005, his sister said.
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Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who announced 12,000 extra police reserves are being called up alongside the 120,000 police and soldiers already in place across the country, said Bouhlel appeared to have been radicalised only recently.
French weekly Journal du Dimanche cited investigators as saying Bouhlel emptied his bank account, sold his auto and told friends about his radicalisation before the attack.
Bouhlel had gone on a reconnaissance trip a few days before the attack and took selfies on the Promenade des Anglais, Molins said.
Relatives and neighbors in Bouhlel’s home town of Msaken outside the coast city of Sousse said he was sporty and had shown no sign of being radicalized, including when he last returned for the wedding of a sister four years ago.
On Sunday, French authorities said that 16 of those killed and one person wounded have yet to be identified.
French MPs will now mull a fourth extension of the eight-month-old state of emergency, as criticism mounts of the Socialist government’s response to a slew of extremist attacks.
President Francois Hollande said the country would observe three days of mourning as he warned that the death toll could rise further, with more than 50 people still fighting for their lives.
Two people were arrested earlier today, while the estranged wife of the truck driver was released from custody.
Meanwhile, a man and a woman were held in Nice on Sunday morning.
On the promenade, crowds booed as Prime Minister Manuel Valls arrived Monday with Marisol Touraine, the health minister – a reaction that reflected widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s perceived failure to prevent the attack, the third terrorist assault on French soil in 19 months.
His father said Bouhlel had violent episodes during which “he broke everything he found around him”.
Nice’s famous Promenade des Anglais, the site of the slaughter, has reopened.
In the days before the attack, it is said Bouhlel persuaded friends to send €100,000 in cash back to his family in their hometown of Msaken, 12 miles from Sousse, where a gunman massacred 38 holidaymakers in June previous year.
“We can’t lock people up on the basis of mere suspicion, or suspicion of suspicion”, minister for parliamentary relations Jean-Marie Le Guen said Tuesday. A man standing nearby said “Never here”.
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Hospital bosses even checked dental records – but still have no idea who the little victim is and said he has had no visitors. “He had some hard times, I took him to a psychiatrist, he took his treatments and he said he had a serious mental illness”.
