The interior ministry said it was checking the claim.
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Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, drove a cargo truck Thursday night through Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France, killing 84 people before he was killed after driving more than a mile. Authorities had been working to find out what his motives were.
Mr Hollande had only last Thursday announced a planned lifting of the emergency security measures – which give the police extra powers to carry out searches and place people under house arrest – originally imposed after the Paris attacks that killed 130 people last November.
The mayor of the southern village of Krzyszkowice, Wladyslaw Dydula, has told the AP that two young women from the village died in the attack in Nice. Police sources said the arrests concerned Bouhlel’s “close entourage”, Reuters reported.
The July 14 carnage in the southern city of Nice has shaken and angered a country still reeling from the November 13 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people at a concert hall, restaurants and cafes, and the national stadium, and a separate January 2015 Paris attack that targeted journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and Jews at a kosher supermarket.
The truck zig-zagged along the seafront Promenade des Anglais for two kilometres as a fireworks display marking the French national day ended. Pained and outraged epitaphs are now written in blue maker on stones placed where police shot him dead.
President Hollande immediately called for a three-month extension of the state of emergency put in place after coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13 a year ago killed 137 people at a sports stadium, several popular cafés, and the Bataclan nightclub.
He had been in trouble with the police in the past for petty crime, but he was not on the watch list of radicalised young men.
In March he was sentenced to six months of probation for throwing a wooden pallet on a person after a vehicle accident.
Oumar Diaby, alias Omar Omsen, who is considered by authorities to be a top Syria-based recruiter, has lured youth from his hometown of Nice to Syria, where he is aligned with Islamic States enemy, al-Nusra.
The probe, which involves more than 400 investigators, confirmed the attack was premediated, the prosecutor said. “We have an individual who was not known to intelligence services”.
He said a review of Bouhlel’s computer and phone showed online searches relating to IS, other jihadi groups and violent images.
Other commentators suggested that the best way to counter ISIS was by fighting the terrorist network on its home ground.
In September 2014, the spokesman for the Islamic State put out a call for the group’s followers to attack Westerners by any means possible, and to do so without awaiting further instructions from the group’s leaders.
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. A five-day annual festival that has run since 1948 had been due to start on Saturday.
A large crowd gathers near a makeshift memorial.
“Nothing will ever be like before”. “Enough of the carnage. Stop the massacre”, read another.
She went downstairs and crossed the street where “there were many many bodies and we knew they were dead because they were covered with sheets”. Life has to remain normal. “I don’t want this to change how we feel about France”, she said as she wiped away a tear from under her sunglasses.
“Anger is the main emotion today”, said Maiche Arlette, a resident of the city.
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American student Nicolas Leslie, 20, who had been missing since the attack was confirmed dead on Sunday, the third known United States fatality.
