NICE, France (RNN) – At least two Americans and 10 children were among the 84 people killed when a man drove a truck through a large Bastille Day crowd at the waterfront where people had gathered to watch fireworks, officials said Friday. There has no claim of responsibility from an outside group and no accomplices have been located.
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However, if he is found to be behind it, an identification card located in the truck he used to mow down his victims shows that he was a French national of Tunisian descent.
“He had a police and judicial record for threats, violence, theft and acts of criminal damage between 2010 and 2016, and had been sentenced by the Nice criminal court to a six-month term, suspended, on March 24 2016 for violence with arms, committed in January 2016”. 11-year old Brodie Copeland and his dad were killed in #Nice attack.
“I don’t think there was a radicalisation issue, I think there was psychiatric problem”, he added.
Molins said that although Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had never been investigated by the security services, he was known to police.
“We are also shocked” by what happened in Nice, the father said.
The choice of Bastille Day highlighted another uncomfortable commonality between Bouhlel and other terrorists implicated in the three major recent attacks in France: He had French nationality, choosing to attack a country – and a city – that was also his own. “He would become angry and he shouted… he would break anything he saw in front of him”, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej-Bouhlel said outside his home in the city of Msaken in eastern Tunisia.
Neighbours in the residential neighbourhood in northern Nice where Bouhlel lived said he had a tense personality and did not mingle with others.
One resident of the apartment block where the family had lived until 18 months ago before they split up said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a violent man who had an extreme reaction to his wife’s request for a divorce. “It is urgent now that it be declared”, she said on Twitter.
He said: ‘France is badly hit. He had a permit to live and work in France. His ex-wife was detained Friday for questioning.
Officials tell Dina that Bouhlel was born in Tunisia and is now a French citizen.
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Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi said the Nice attack – which he called barbaric and cowardly – resembled the Sousse attack in June 2015, according to the Tunisian News Agency.
