The Islamic State group has claimed lorry driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was “a soldier” acting on its behalf by committing the murders.
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Cazeneuve says: “These links for now have not been established by the investigation”.
Many families are angry that they couldn’t find information about missing loved ones, and many are angry at police for not preventing the deadly attack despite France being under a state of emergency imposed after Islamic State attacks past year in Paris.
Seven people are in custody in the probe into the Nice attack.
Between current reservists, and the call for more volunteers, “we can say that France, with you, is forming a National Guard”, Hollande said Wednesday on a visit to a military training complex in southwest France.
But on the city’s famed Promenade des Anglais, passers-by piled garbage on the bloodstained spot where Bouhlel was killed. The official wouldn’t comment on the content of the text messages or confirm reports that they included a request for more weapons.
A police source said that the information gleaned from acquaintances pointed to “a recent conversion to radical Islam” but that there had been no mention yet of any affiliation to ISIS.
“That is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack”, said Valls, warning that “terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time”.
The apartment on Route de Turin, where Bouhlel was believed to be living before the attack, was raided by police, and a view through the keyhole showed items including what appeared to be boxes of medication and a strip of tablets.
The attack in the French Riviera, France’s fifth largest city, came on the country’s revered July 14 Bastille Day national holiday at the height of tourism season.
Cazeneuve maintained that the attack was “of a terrorist nature”, despite the fact that the attacker, identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, gave no indication he was motivated by politics or religion.
On Saturday afternoon, 36 hours after the 31-year old truck driver’s rampage, cafe tables were empty, markets closed and deck chairs lay unused.
“The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State”, the ISIS-supporting news agency Amaq wrote on a statement on its Telegram account. The Islamist militant group claimed the attack though, and Valls said there was no doubting the assailant’s motives.
French Health Minister Marisol Touraine urged survivors to seek counselling offered by the government. It was the third large-scale terror attack that France has suffered in the past 18 months.
Under fire from opposition politicians and jeered by crowds at a remembrance ceremony on Monday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls wants lawmakers to back a three-month rollover of the emergency regime imposed after a previous lethal attack last November.
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It is for the first time since the war in Algeria (1954-1962) when this exceptional regime prevailed nearly eight months, when a state of emergency lasts that long in France, says France Presse. Even two days after the attack, some families were still going from hospital to hospital in search of people who had disappeared in the attack’s bloody chaos.
