The photo of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel who carried out a terror attack in Nice city of France has been published by French media.
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“France is horrified by what has just occurred – a monstrous act of using a truck to intentionally kill dozens of people celebrating 14th of July”, French President Francois Hollande said during a nationally televised address early Friday.
Wassim Bouhlel said: “There was carnage on the road”.
Witnesses said Bouhlel, who prosecutors confirmed was driving a rented truck, was “zigzagging” through the crowd to inflict as much damage as possible.
Police found one pistol and various fake weapons in the truck’s cabin.
He said: “I kept yelling at him, waving with my hands to stop and trying to tell him that there is a lot people under his truck – dead already”. Attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices and a kosher supermarket in Paris killed 16 people in January 2015.
A neighbour, who wished to remain unnamed, described him as, “frankly, not normal”, adding that he was “almost always alone”, would never engage with people in the apartment building and that he had a tendency to stare at children.
Revelers had been celebrating at the end of a fireworks show on Nice’s main street when the truck driver plowed into the crowd of approximately 40,000, reportedly accelerating as he drove toward and through the party-goers.
Police could be seen surrounding the truck, its windscreen riddled with bullet holes, under the light of the Negresco Hotel in the aftermath of the attack, which has become a makeshift hospital. “Her son was on the ground, bleeding”, he said.
There don’t appear to be any obvious indications that Bouhlel was radicalized in a French prison or by a radical mosque – neighbors in other media reports suggest he wasn’t particularly religious.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel came from the Tunisian town of Msaken which he last visited four years ago, Tunisian security sources said on Friday.
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French and American law enforcement officials tell NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston the suspect’s name and age and say that they have not yet found any direct connections between the suspect and terrorist groups. French authorities are working to determine if the attacker had any accomplices. She said she felt she knew Bouhlel, and is shocked by what authorities said he’s done. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
