While some family and friends have described the 31-year-old as someone who smoked, drank, and never attended the local mosque, others questioned indicated “a recent shift to radical Islam”, said a police source.
Advertisement
The Bastille Day truck attacker cased the Nice promenade with the hulking truck twice leading up to the deadly fireworks celebration along the Mediterranean coast, French investigators said.
Previously, Mr Cazeneuve said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel seemed to have been “radicalised very quickly”, urging that this was a “new type of attack…[and] showed the extreme difficulty of the fight against terrorism”.
A sea of people thronged the seafront in Nice for a solemn minute’s silence on the last official day of mourning Monday.
“This quick flip to violence in the name of a political ideology becomes legitimate”, she said.
In Nice, many people were still desperately looking for news of their loved ones among the dead and 121 still hospitalized.
A man and a woman were arrested on Sunday, and another five people including his estranged wife were still in custody.
French President Francois Hollande met with his defence and security chiefs and cabinet ministers on Saturday and called for national unity in France.
However, a day after insisting that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had no terror links and was only known to police in connection with petty crimes, the French government said he must indeed have had such links. Even two days after the attack, some families were still going from hospital to hospital in search of people who had disappeared in the attack’s bloody chaos.
Yet within 48 hours of the attack, the Islamic State group claimed him as one of its foot soldiers, suggesting that volatile people such as Behloul may be prone to rapid radicalization, thereby posing a hard to calculate risk for authorities. That didn’t stop politicians from sniping at one another over who bore responsibility for failing to stop the attack.
Reflecting the widespread criticism of the government’s security measures, Prime Minister Manuel Valls was loudly booed Monday as he came to a memorial ceremony on the Nice shore.
The attack has sparked a national debate about whether security officials did all they could to prevent the attack – the third mass slaughter in France over the past 18 months.
However there has been no evidence yet linking him to the Islamic State group, which on Saturday, July 16, claimed the attack.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that the challenge of finding and stopping people like Bouhlel was “worse than the needle in the haystack”.
A neighbour and her young daughter said he lived a reclusive life, failing to respond when they said hello.
The attack killed 84 people and wounded 200.
Advertisement
Around 85 victims remain in hospital and 18 of them – including one child – are in a life-threatening condition. Assaults in January 2015 on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket were also claimed by Islamic State, which controls swathes of Iraq and Syria but is now under military pressure from forces opposed to it.
