At 5pm on July 14 – the day of the attack on crowds watching a firework display in Nice – Lahouaiej-Bouhlel recorded a message saying: “Chokri and his friends are ready for next month, they are now with Walid”, according to Le Monde.
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The man who killed 84 people in a terrorist attack in Nice last week planned his assault over several months and got help from at least five people, the Paris prosecutor said Thursday.
Truck attacker Bouhlel had long plotted the carnage in the French city with the assistance of the five suspects now charged as being accomplices, prosecutor Francois Molins said on Thursday.
With a criminal record for robbery and drug offences, 22-year-old Franco-Tunisian Ramzi A is the only one of the suspects who was known to investigators prior to the attack.
Ramzi, Chokri and Oualid are charged with being accomplices to murder by a terror group. A married couple from Albania, who allegedly gave Bouhlel the pistol he used in the police shootout, were also arrested.
The third major attack in France in 18 months has left France’s Socialist government fending off accusations of failing to protect the nation.
President Francois Hollande has announced France will send artillery equipment to Iraq as part of increased military aid to fight Islamic State extremists, after the deadly Bastille Day lorry attack in Nice.
Eight days after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel rammed a lorry into crowds enjoying a firework display on Nice’s seafront promenade, 12 people were still fighting for their lives in hospital, Hollande said.
A troubled, secretive, and deeply unpleasant one, the New York Times found in interviews with those who knew Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
The prosecutor said the investigation made “notable advances” since the Bastille Day attack by Bouhlel, a Tunisian who had been living legally in Nice for years.
While the Islamic State group claimed the attack, describing him as a “soldier”, investigators have not found direct proof of his allegiance to the jihadists.
However, Mr Molins said the investigation had confirmed that the attack was premeditated.
Top regional official Christian Estrosi, of the conservative opposition Republicans party, had argued for tougher security for Nice’s Bastille Day fireworks celebrations.
In May previous year, he took a photo of an article about the drug Captagon, an amphetamine used by jihadists in Syria.
A French security official said this may have been intentional, in response to ISIS suggestions to some followers in the West that they hide their radical faith to stay off police radar. “I am glad they brought in Allah’s soldiers to finish the job”.
It comes after Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that French national police were guarding the pedestrianized boulevard but later conceded that only local police, carrying light arms, were at the entrance of the promenade.
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In a related development, France’s lawmakers voted Wednesday to extend the state of emergency for another six months, continuing greater police search-and-arrest powers without advance clearance from judges. The security measure had been in place since the November 13 Paris attacks that killed 130 victims and were claimed by the Islamic State group.
