NICE // French investigators arrested two more people on Sunday as they pieced together details about the motives and planning of the Tunisian man who rammed a lorry into a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks, killing 84 people.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel staked out the Nice promenade with his rented lorry twice in the two days before his attack on Thursday night, according to a source close to the investigation.
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.
However there has been no evidence yet linking him to ISIL, which on Saturday claimed the attack.
In Nice, many people were still desperately waiting for news of their loved ones among the dead.
Prosecutors said only 35 victims have been officially identified as they take painstaking measures to avoid the identification errors that occurred in the aftermath of last November’s attacks in Paris.
“We have no news, neither good nor bad,” said Johanna, a Lithuanian who was looking for her two friends, aged 20.
At least 10 children were among the dead as well as tourists from the United States, Ukraine, Switzerland Germany and about 10 from Russia, a local Russian association said.
French health minister Marisol Touraine said that 85 people were still hospitalised, 18 people of them in critical condition.
On the second day of national mourning, the Russian Orthodox Church in Nice held an emotional mass for the victims. Another service was planned at Paris’s iconic Notre-Dame cathedral.
An Albanian couple were arrested in Nice on Sunday over the attack and were being held alongside four others. Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s estranged wife was released after two days of questioning.
One of those being held is a 22-year-old who is suspected of lending logistical support to Lahouaiej Bouhlel, said his lawyer Jean-Pascal Padovani.
He said the two had only known each other for a few months and that there was “no material evidence” against his client.
Despite several brushes with the law for petty crime, Lahouaiej Bouhlel had never appeared on the radar of intelligence services for links to extremism.
Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Saturday that the father-of-three, who had been living in Nice for years, “seemed to have been radicalised very quickly, from what his friends and family” told police.
People who went to the same gym as Lahouaiej Bouhlel – where he did salsa dancing and lifted weights – described him as a “conceited” man who “would flirt with anything that moved”.
ISIL said one of its “soldiers” carried out the attack “in response to calls to target nations of coalition states that are fighting [the group]”.
Mr Cazeneuve described the massacre as a “a new kind of attack” which highlighted “the extreme difficulty of the antiterrorism fight”.
“We are now confronted with individuals open to IS’s message to engage in extremely violent actions without necessarily having been trained or having the weapons to carry out a mass [casualty] attack,” he said.
France’s third major attack in the past 18 months has left Paris fending off criticism over security failures and scrambling to reassure its citizens that they are protected.
Mr Cazeneuve called for volunteers to boost security forces who have already been reinforced and are on high alert under an eight-month-old state of emergency.
“I want to call on all French patriots who wish to do so, to join this operational reserve,” said the interior minister. The reserve force is currently made up of 12,000 volunteers aged between 17 and 30.
Thursday’s attack came just over a week after a French parliamentary inquiry criticised numerous failings by the intelligence services following extremist attacks last January and November.
France is a prime target of ISIL due to its role in fighting the group in Iraq and Syria, its cherished secular values, and what the government has admitted is a “social and ethnic apartheid” that alienates its large Muslim community.
Hundreds of French militants have already gone to fight alongside ISIL in Iraq and Syria. But it is those who are inspired by ISIL from afar and have no links to militant networks that create the biggest headache for intelligence services.
French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian noted that ISIL had recently repeated calls for supporters to “directly attack the French, Americans, wherever they are and by whatever means”.
“Even when Daesh is not the organiser, Daesh breathes life into the terrorist spirit that we are fighting,” he said.
* Agence France-Presse