At least 84 people were killed and hundreds more injured when gunman Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove an articulated lorry into crowds watching a Bastille Day firework display on Thursday night.
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While Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, the 31-year-old, Tunisian-born truck driver had not shown signs of radicalization until just weeks before the attack, prosecutors said. A Tunisian man was able to drive a 19-tonne truck along a packed sea-front promenade, mowing down people in the Bastille Day crowd, before he was shot dead by police.
France’s prime minister said in remarks published on Sunday that the attack, which was claimed by Islamic State, was Islamist in nature and that Bouhlel had radicalized “very quickly”.
Two days after the atrocity, many families are still hunting for missing loved ones, going from hospital to hospital in an effort to find people who’ve disappeared in the chaos of the truck’s rampage Officials said 202 people had been wounded in the attack, with 25 of them on life support as of late Friday.
All seven people taken in for questioning said Bouhlel was violent and unstable.
Hollande’s Socialist government has been under heavy criticism for its response to a slew of extremist attacks.
“We can not exclude that he was an unbalanced and very violent individual, and it seems that his psychology demonstrates these traits, was at one time, in a rapid radicalisation, (was) committed to this absolutely appalling crime”, Cazeneuve said on Monday (18 July).
Bunches of flowers and candles left on the Promenade des Anglais, many at the exact spots where people were killed, have swelled in number. Investigators are looking into the nature of the links between Bouhlel and Diaby’s associate, but they can not rule out that the two were possibly just part of the same social circle.
The Islamic State terror group has claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack in a statement published in an IS media outlet, calling the attacker a “soldier”.
The security official said Bouhlel sold his auto just before the attack, which appeared premeditated.
“We have an enemy who is going to continue to strike all the people, all the countries who have freedom as a fundamental value”, Hollande said.
“Even when Daesh is not the organiser, Daesh breathes life into the terrorist spirit that we are fighting”, he said, using an Arabic name for IS.
2350: Sebastien Humbert, deputy prefect of the Alpes-Maritime region that includes Nice, says the early death toll estimate is around 30 and that the incident is for now being described as a “criminal attack”.
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They include a 40-year-old whom Bouhlel had known for a long time and a 38-year-old Albanian, detained along with his girlfriend and suspected of providing the attacker with an automatic pistol.
