The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, identified the attacker as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a delivery-truck driver who was born on January 3, 1985, and raised in Msaken, a town in northeastern Tunisia. The broadcaster says he lived in Nice and was married with three children.
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Friends and family members are sharing photos of their loved ones online in a desperate bid to locate them after 84 people were killed when a terrorist gunman drove a 25-ton truck through crowds on a mile-long killing spree on Thursday night.
The neighbours of the man suspected to have killed scores of people in a truck attack on the Nice seafront described him Friday as a loner with no visible religious affiliation, as forensic experts searched his flat. Molins said he was unknown to the intelligence services, and had never been the subject of any kind of screening or showed any indication of radicalization.
A security source said: “He was known to the police for violence, and using weapons, but had no direct links with terrorism”. He told reporters that in March 2016, Bouhlal received a suspended six-month prison sentence for an assault that happened in January 2016.
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His identity papers and a bank card were found in the truck and his identity had been confirmed by fingerprints, he said. He was not known by the Tunisian authorities to hold radical or Islamist views, and had held a French residence permit for the past 10 years without obtaining French nationality, Tunisian sources said. He hailed from the town of Msaken – 10 miles from Sousse, where an ISIS-claimed attack killed 39 people at a beach resort a year ago. We’ll move quickly to correct the record and we’ll only point to the best information we have at the time.
