ISIS is claiming responsibility for this week’s terror attack in the French city of Nice, in which 84 people were killed after a man drove a truck through a large crowd watching fireworks and celebrating Bastille Day, the French day of independence.
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The police officers who confronted truck driver Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel in Nice pumped around 20 bullets into his truck in the shootout that ended his bloody Bastille Day rampage, according to an affidavit seen by AFP.
A man holds a French National flag.
The Islamic State group seemed to claim responsibility for the attack, saying he was a “soldier” who had responded to “calls to target nations of coalition states that are fighting (IS)”.
In a debate prior to the vote, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the country had to brace itself for further fatal attacks despite the government taking steps to prevent them, the BBC reports.
“That is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack, ‘ said Valls, warning that ‘terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time”.
French authorities earlier said they had been questioning five people Saturday.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old delivery driver, was shot dead by police on Thursday night after careering along a packed sea-front promenade in Nice for about 2 km (1.5 miles), zigzagging in order to run over as many victims as possible. His father, who lives in Tunisia, said Bouhlel had had mental health issues.
An official with a special victims’ center in Nice told reporters Sunday that 16 bodies remain unidentified, and forensic experts are working with DNA samples to determine their identities. The man was “entirely unknown by the intelligence services, whether nationally or locally”, French prosecutor Francois Molins said.
Relatives and neighbors in Bouhlel’s home town of Msaken outside the coast city of Sousse said he was sporty and had shown no sign of being radicalized, including when he last returned for the wedding of a sister four years ago. He has also enacted Operation Sentinel, introduced after terror attacks in January 2015, that allow 10,000 extra military personnel to boost the ranks of security forces across the country.
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Speaking ahead of Tuesday evening’s parliamentary debate on the state of emergency, Le Foll said President François Hollande’s Socialist government was willing to consider a longer, six-month extension in line with demands from rightwing members of the national assembly.
