The Tunisian man who plowed his truck through crowds in Nice had researched the route ahead of the attack that killed at least 84 people and injured scores of others as they were celebrating Bastille Day, according to French media reports. The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement Sunday that 49 people hurt in the attack remained in critical condition, 18 of them fighting for their lives.
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French authorities have yet to produce evidence that he had turned to radical Islam.
Valls defended France’s record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years and said the group’s modus operandi of cajoling unstable people into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible was hard to combat.
Hollande’s Socialist government has been under heavy criticism for its response to a slew of extremist attacks.
The completion of the identification process comes as France’s National Assembly voted in favour of extending by six months the state of emergency – a security measure that’s been in place since the November 13 Paris attacks that were claimed by IS.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, jeered by crowds at a remembrance ceremony last Monday and criticised by political opponents over the attack, called for national unity when presenting the emergency rule bill overnight.
A man named as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove his vehicle more than one mile along the coastal French city’s Promenade de Anglais, injuring more than 200 people and killing 84 people, including several children.
Early on Saturday, French police arrested three people in Nice in connection with the probe into Thursday’s attack.
France began three days of national mourning on Saturday, in memory of those who died in the terror attack.
Mohamed Bouhlel seemed “so happy and there was no sign that he was planning for something bad”, his brother said.
The attacker was a delivery worker and father of a family, prosecutor Molins said.
The interior minister pledged to boost the presence of security forces across the country and called on willing “French patriots” to join the country’s operational reservists – now made up of 12,000 volunteers.
France’s “operational reservists” include French citizens with or without military experience as well as former soldiers. The reserve force is now made up of 12,000 volunteers aged between 17 and 30. “The individual who committed this absolutely despicable, unspeakable crime was not known by the intelligence services, as he had not stood out over the past years for support of radical Islamist ideology”.
After crisis talks in Paris, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian noted that IS had recently repeated calls for supporters to “directly attack the French, Americans, wherever they are and by whatever means”.
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“The terrorism threat is will be a fundamental and enduring problem and other lives will be wrecked”, he said.
