On Thursday night, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck through a group of people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France, killing 84 people and injuring more than 200 others.
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“The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State”, the Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said on its Telegram account.
The rented, refrigerated truck weighed about 20 tons.
The office released no additional information about the arrests; it was unclear who was in custody or why.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Saturday that initial investigations showed that the perpetrator of Nice terror attack, which killed 84 people on Thursday, was “radicalized very quickly”. The other four are men.
Within minutes the attack was over, with Bouhlel dead in a hail of police gunfire.
“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.
“When he got angry he yelled and broke everything around him”, Mohamed Mondher Laouaiej-Bouhlel said.
“What I know is that he didn’t pray, he didn’t go to the mosque, he had no ties to religion”, said the father, noting that Bouhlel didn’t respect the Islamic fasting rituals during Ramadan. Still, Molins said, “there were no red flags for radicalization”, and as such was “completely unknown to both France’s domestic and foreign intelligence officials”, whose name is not in the country’s “S file” of suspected terrorists. He had a history of violence, but the police said they never saw any indication that he’d been radicalized. Although he found a wife, with whom he is reported to have had three children, he allegedly beat her until she threw him out of their apartment, in a low-income complex on the north side of Nice. A driver plowed a large truck through a crowd of thousands gathered for a fireworks display along the city’s famous waterfront promenade.
But as the last firework fizzled, gunfire rang out – authorities and witnesses say the driver shot from the cab of the truck – and the truck accelerated down the crowded street.
Officials said 202 people had been wounded in the attack, including many children.
Diaby-who now calls himself Omar Omsen-also traveled to Syria and put out a phony announcement claiming he had been killed in the hopes of throwing authorities off his trail, the source said.
Estrosi said some of the city’s 1,200 security cameras had pinpointed the moment the attacker boarded the truck, far from the seaside “in the hills of Nice” and could follow his path to the promenade.
“And when there isn’t a connection to the core group or to these professional terrorists, it makes it very hard for intelligence agencies to intercept communications and to find out the plans in advance”, he said. In the trailer was the bicycle and some empty pallets.
It is the third time President François Hollande has declared days of mourning since the Charlie Hebdo attacks that left 17 dead in January 2015.
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He was speaking as a number of people arrested as part of a police inquiry into the attack in Nice arrived under police escort in Paris on Monday for questioning at the headquarters of France’s counter-terrorism department in the western edge of Paris. “People here in Nice are just stunned, shocked that such a frightful, freaky attack happened in the heart of their city on this lovely beach”. Istanbul, Orlando, Baghdad, Brussels and Dhaka in Bangladesh are among targets hit in recent months.
