A report in the Nice Matin newspaper yesterday said investigators had found no radicalisation material in his flat, but were still looking at his telephone and his computer.
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Molins said that six people were still being detained for questioning by the police, including one person who appears to be the recipient of a text message sent at 10:27pm on the night of the attack, mentioning a handgun.
Unlike the perpetrators of those attacks, Bouhlel, a petty criminal with a history of violence and depression, did not travel to the Middle East for training or jihad.
Police are still seeking to understand what motivated the killer – and they have yet to establish any connection to a terrorist group.
The motorcyclist chased the truck and also tried to open the driver’s door to overpower Bouhlel but fell off and ended up under the wheels, according to a German journalist who filmed the events on his phone.
The victim was bleeding profusely and told officers that Bouhlel – who stayed on the scene after the attack to continue a delivery with his truck – was responsible.
“What we want to know now is what were the links between the man who was behind this terrible attack and the terrorist networks”, CNN reported Cazeneuve said.
CCTV imagery also shows that the attacker driving his truck down the Promenade des Anglais on July 12, even stopping briefly in front of the Negresco hotel with his warning lights on.
Mohamed Bouhlel seemed “so happy and there was no sign that he was planning for something bad”, his brother said. However, Jabeur declined to show the photograph.
The image of a man cold-bloodedly planning an act of carnage that targeted happy families contrasted with earlier descriptions of him as mentally unstable and prone to violent fits of rage.
Shortly afterward, Bouhlel’s estranged wife, who was arrested Friday, was released from custody, according to an official in the Paris prosecutor’s office. She was not a suspect but was questioned about Bouhlel’s possible links with Islamist extremism. The driver was a Tunisian man who had been living in Nice for several years.
Meanwhile, Nicolas Leslie, a University of California, Berkeley, student who had been missing after the attack, has been confirmed dead, the school said Sunday, relaying information it had received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Anywhere else in the world a minister with such a bad record – 250 deaths in 18 months – would have resigned a long time ago”, she told reporters.
France’s government, smarting from accusations that it did not do enough to avert last week’s deadly truck attack Nice, urged lawmakers on Tuesday to extend a period of emergency rule that gives police greater search-and-arrest powers.
“There is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It’s hard to say this, but other lives will be lost”, he said.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve’s clarification comes after a newspaper accused French authorities of lacking transparency in their handling of the massacre.
Patrons of the small Nice gym where the brawny bodybuilder was a regular until two years ago and took salsa classes for a time, recalled him as a vain “show-off”.
The attack is the third major terror attack in France since the Charlie Hebdo shootings in 2015.
“There were no heavy weapons or explosives used”, he said.
Scores are still being treated in hospital, 19 of them in critical condition.
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Mourners are placing bunches of flowers on the blood stains left behind on the Nice promenade.
