People who went to the same gym as Lahouaiej-Bouhlel – where he did salsa dancing and lifted weights – described him as a “conceited” man who “would flirt with anything that moved”.
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“It was hard, but she did it”, Garino said, adding, “she was no longer in contact with him”.
The spokeswoman of Lenval children’s hospital in Nice, Stephanie Simpson, said the boy is Romanian and had been visiting Nice with his parents, who are missing.
A neighbour and her young daughter said he lived a reclusive life, failing to respond when they said hello. Simpson said “there is still hope he is going to wake up”.
“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.
If someone is an extremist of “one or two days vintage” it’s easy to cause mayhem, he said on CNN.
Although ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack on Saturday, authorities have yet to find any direct links between the truck driver and the terrorist group. He says the group sees “the noose closing around them”.
The two are suspected of helping Bouhlel obtain a pistol that was found in the truck, according to a French security official not authorized to be publicly named speaking about an ongoing investigation.
The woman was released Sunday. The mother of Bouhlel’s three kids is in the process of divorcing the 31-year-old Tunisian. Her ministerial post was created earlier this year by François Hollande after families of victims of other attacks, including the Charlie Hebdo massacre and November’s Paris attacks, complained of mistakes, delays and failings in dealing with relatives and passing on information about the identities of the dead.
Investigators believe Bouhlel was texting about the cache of guns and explosives in a rented truck he used in the attack.
Six people are being held in connection with the killings, the latest being an Albanian couple who have not been identified.
– By Thomas Adamson in Paris.
The Tunisian-born man who drove a lorry into crowds of people in Nice researched the route in the days before the attack, French media have reported.
A number of tourists from all over the world were among the 84 killed in the attack, when a lorry was driven along a busy promenade into a crowd.
A special church service was being held at a Nice cathedral Sunday in honour of the victims.
Touraine also said one of the people hospitalized still has not been identified.
The Islamic State group “is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks … that is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack”, he said Sunday.
“The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly”, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview with newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.
The Islamist militant group claimed the attack though, and Valls said there was no doubting the assailant’s motives.
“That last day he said he was in Nice with his European friends to celebrate the national holiday”, the brother, Jabeur, said, adding that in the photo “he seemed very happy and pleased, he was laughing a lot”.
Valls said he feared terrorism would continue to plague France for a long time.
Health Minister Marisol Touraine urged any survivors to seek counseling offered by the government after the Bastille Day attack Thursday night that killed 84 people.
A man and women were detained Sunday morning in Nice, the AP, Reuters and Agence France Presse reported, all citing an unnamed official from the Paris prosecutor’s office.
The reports say Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove through the seafront promenade area of the southern French city on Tuesday and Wednesday last week in preparation. IS said he was following their call to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists.
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Flowers commemorating the spot where someone was killed in the the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.
