As the Bastille Day crowd enjoyed festivities on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel careered his large white lorry towards them.
Advertisement
Paris prosecutor François Molins said authorities found “revealing” online searches and photos on the cellphone and laptop belonging to Nice killer Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel dating back to previous year, including photos of the 2015 fireworks display.
The disclosures raise the possibility that Lahouaiej Bouhlel and his suspected accomplices were part of a broader jihadist group that went undetected, in what would be another security failing by French authorities after two major terror attacks over the past 18 months.
One photo in his phone, taken May 25, 2015, was an article on Captagon, a drug said to be used by some jihadis before attacks.
Bouhlel, a Tunisian national living in Nice, was shot dead by police after ramming a lorry through a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day, France’s national holiday.
On April 4 this year, Chokri C. sent Bouhlel a Facebook message reading: “Load the truck with 2,000 tonnes of iron. release the brakes my friend and I will watch”.
Molins said he was seeking charges against four men and one woman, three of whom were of Tunisian or joint French-Tunisian nationality and two holding Albanian nationality.
Speaking to reporters here in the French capital, François Molins said an analysis of the attacker’s cellphone revealed photographs and search histories suggesting that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the 31-year-old Tunisian-born driver of the truck, had contemplated an attack as early as 2015.
With a criminal record for robbery and drug offences, 22-year-old Franco-Tunisian Ramzi A is the only one of the suspects who was known to investigators prior to the attack.
Before the attack, one of the suspects cheered the January 2015 terrorist attack at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, saying, “I’m happy!”
The five suspects, who were arrested in the days after the attack, were to be charged Thursday.
About 36 hours after the attack, A’ Maq, the press agency supporting ISIS, claimed Bouhlel was a “soldier of the Islamic State, who (had) carried out the operation in response to calls to target states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State”.
His comments came in response to French newspaper Libération’s accusations that Cazeneuve had lied about the presence of the national police officers and cars, and that authorities lacked transparency about the attack.
Advertisement
The criticism comes as the National Assembly extended France’s state of emergency for six months.
