The Islamic State group, in claiming the attack today, said he was a “soldier” who had responded to “calls to target nations of coalition states that are fighting (IS)”. Two days after the atrocity, some families were still hunting for missing loved ones, going from hospital to hospital to find people who had disappeared in the bloody chaos of the truck’s rampage.
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But the statement made no reference by name to Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the 31-year-old dual Tunisian native whom police shot dead here Thursday night and have identified as the driver of the truck that carried out the attack. He was unknown to intelligence services and there is no evidence yet he had been to Syria.
However the arrests concern the attacker’s “close entourage”, sources told Reuters.
The truck tore down the packed Nice promenade while revelers were gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks display, crushing the people in its wake.
The truck zigzagged for two kilometers into the crowd before police bullets killed the driver and brought an end to the carnage. It was the third mass-casualty attack against France in 18 months, leaving many shocked and horrified by the particulars but no longer surprised by the larger picture.
President Francois Hollande called the Nice attack “undeniably terrorist in nature” and extended a state of emergency imposed after the November 13, 2015, assault on Paris nightspots that claimed 130 lives. In March, he was given a six-month suspended sentence by a Nice court for a road-rage incident.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says that the truck driver who killed 84 people when he careened into a crowd at a fireworks show was “radicalized very quickly”.
Terrorism experts cautioned that the statement did not necessarily point to a formal link between IS and the Nice attack.
Rebab, Bouhlel’s sister, said her brother had not been in the habit of calling the family.
Bouhlel’s father also denied claims that his son was an Islamic State militant, stating the killer had “nothing to do with religion” but was suffering from mental illness.
The claim does not necessarily indicate that the attack was actually planned or commissioned by Islamic State; it may be simply a recognition of the attacker as an IS soldier after an individual initiative.
In Nice, where the holiday season would normally be in full swing, organizers of the annual Jazz festival joined the singer Rihanna in cancelling their event.
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“Nothing will ever be like before…Nissa ma belle” read one, a reference to the hymn “Nissa la Bella”, or Nice the lovely, sung in the local Nicois dialect. “He never told me that he’d do such a thing, our family still can’t believe what’s happened”, Jaber Bouhlel said.
