Crowds jeered the French prime minister when he joined other officials in Nice to remember victims killed during the lorry rampage on the city’s promenade.
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The 31-year-old Tunisian barreled through Bastille Day crowds in a rental truck, killing 84 and wounding dozens more before being killed by police.
Last week’s attack took place in a pedestrian zone in Nice where 30,000 people – families and fun-seekers among them – turned out for Bastille Day celebrations.
Yet within 48 hours of the attack, the Islamic State group claimed him as one of its foot soldiers, suggesting that volatile people such as Behloul may be prone to rapid radicalization, thereby posing a hard to calculate risk for authorities.
It is not the first time that reality and cinematic fiction have collided in the wake of an attack.
His father, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who still lives in Tunisia, said, “He didn’t pray, he didn’t fast, he drank alcohol”.
Its distributor SND Films pulled out and the movie was eventually picked up by British company Pretty Pictures and given a new release date of November 18.
Last week’s attack occurred just eight months after the coordinated shootings and bombings across Paris that left 130 people dead.
French authorities said six people are in custody in connection with the attacks.
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.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said only 35 bodies have been definitively identified so far.
The jokes showed defiance in the face of multiple deadly attacks on French soil in recent months.
Cazeneuve initially said “national police were present and very present on the Promenade des Anglais” and suggested that their cars were blocking the walkway entrance, in a speech two days after the July 14 attack.
In what represents a backtracking from his previous claim that there was, Bernard Cazeneuve says local police, who are more lightly armed, were guarding the entrance where Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove his truck.
He was shot dead by police when his vehicle’s path along the Promenade des Anglais was eventually halted.
The Islamic State statement said Bouhlel was following their calls to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists, but it’s unclear whether he had concrete links to the group.
Instead, he said, investigators found signs of a premeditated attack by a man who “showed a certain recent interest for radical jihadist movements”.
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“When (the witness) expressed his surprise, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel said, ‘I am used to it, ‘” said Mr Molins on Monday.
