Bastille Day killer: Extremist or just a violent, angry man?

French-Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel asked rental firm for the biggest lorry they had in order to inflict maximum casualties on the crowds gathered at Nice's seafront on Thursday night.

The residence permit of Mohamed Lahouiaej Bouhlel who rammed his lorry into a crowd of revellers on Bastille Day. French police source/AFP

NICE // Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who hired the heaviest lorry he could find to inflict maximum casualties on the Bastille Day crowds in Nice, was radicalised “very quickly”, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Saturday.

On Friday, Mr Cazeneuve had clashed on live television with prime minister Manuel Valls, claiming it was “too early” to say that the killer was a “terrorist without doubt linked to radical Islamism in one way or another”, as Mr Valls had put it.

But a day later, the interior minister said that evidence of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s recent radicalisation came from investigators’ interviews with members of the militant’s entourage who were taken into police custody on Friday and Saturday.

The interior minister said this indicated that individuals could now be drawn into acts of extreme violence on behalf of ISIL even without first participating in combat or receiving training.

ISIL has gleefully claimed the Nice massacre as the work of one of its followers, though Mr Cazeneuve was previously inclined to adopt a “wait and see” approach in case the extremist group merely wished to make an opportunistic admission of responsibility.

However, Alexandre Mendel, the author of a book on French extremists, La France Djihadiste, told The National on Saturday that too much planning had gone into the attack for it to be the work of a maverick "lone wolf". Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a delivery driver who was said by French media to have had financial problems, had been able to finance the rental of a heavy vehicle on Monday, equip himself with real and fake firearms and work out how to drive into the pedestrianised zone during Thursday's fireworks display at Nice's Promenade des Anglais.

The firm that rented him the lorry, Via Location, told the Nice-Matin newspaper that it had supplied the vehicle in good faith and said it was "deeply shocked" by the use to which it was put.

“The heaviest, most powerful and biggest” lorry available, the newspaper said, “to cause maximum casualties”.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, the father of three children aged between 18 months and five years, had a record of theft, violence and threatening behaviour but was not known to the intelligence service responsible for tracking suspected extremists.

His role in the massacre is the first example in recent years of a major attack carried out on French soil by someone with no officially listed terrorist profile.

Neighbours of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s in the Abattoirs district of Nice say he gave no sign of radicalisation or even of any interest in religion. They also say he was troubled by the breakdown of his marriage. Police files show he was guilty of domestic violence when the family was living together in the city’s northern suburbs.

"His wife left him because he kept hitting her," Hamid, one acquaintance, told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper. "He wasn't an observant Muslim. He ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and didn't fast during Ramadan. When I hear them saying he did this for Islam it makes me shudder. So many innocents died ... To me, he wasn't even a Muslim, more of a psychopath."

At the apartment where Lahouaiej-Bouhlel lived alone after separating from his wife, the Nice attacker gave the impression of being a depressed, aggressive and even “weird” loner according to other people living in the same four-storey building in Route de Turin. In Tunisia, his own father has spoken to media of a son with psychological problems.

One neighbour in Nice, identifying herself as Jasmine, told The National she felt so ashamed of being a resident of the same building that she was now determined to move. It has since emerged that two of those killed on Thursday night by the man living on the floor above her were a friend and his son.

One of ISIL’s “soldiers of Islam” – a phrase reflecting a view of Islam denounced by scholars as twisted and false – or an unhinged misfit with a grudge? The full story of what propelled Lahouaiej-Bouhlel to a night of deadly violence may never be known.

* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse