Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian-born émigré was behind the wheel of a truck that barreled into Bastille Day revelers and claimed at least 84 lives. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
NICE, France — French authorities on Sunday arrested two more suspects potentially linked to the man who rammed a truck into crowds, killing 84 people in this French Riviera city, as investigators sought to determine his path to radicalization and whether he acted alone.
Authorities also said the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, had sent a text message seeking more weapons and had visited the scene of the attack days before the carnage.
Seven people have been detained in connection with the Thursday attack, including Bouhlel’s ex-wife, but she was reportedly released from custody Sunday morning, according to authorities speaking to local media.
Bouhlel, 31, was a “soldier of the Islamic State,” the militant group declared Saturday. French authorities said the Tunisian-born attacker was inspired by terrorist organizations.
Twelve victims have not been identified, said France’s minister of health, Marisol Touraine, speaking to reporters Sunday. A 6-month-old child was among 18 people still in critical condition in the hospital.
The number of wounded also rose to 256, according to the French prosecutor’s office, with 85 still hospitalized.
Meanwhile, French authorities released new details to local media of the last moments before the attack, suggesting that Bouhlel may have had accomplices. The attacker, they said, sent a text message to someone — thought to be among those currently held for questioning — saying, “Bring more weapons.”
The message was sent at 10:27 p.m., roughly a half-hour before the attack on the iconic Promenade Des Anglais, where tens of thousands were gathered to watch a Bastille Day fireworks display. The phone, police said, was found inside Bouhlel’s rented 19-ton refrigerator truck after he mowed down people for more than a mile and was subsequently killed in a shootout with police.
French authorities on Sunday also provided more details that suggested the attack was carefully premeditated.
Speaking to local media, Jean-Michel Decugis, head of the judicial police department, said Bouhlel was supposed to have returned the rental truck a day before the attack.
On the two days before the attack, security-camera footage showed him driving the truck on the Promenade Des Anglais, apparently staking it out, Decugis said. He added that Bouhlel also emptied out his bank account, according to one of the suspects in custody.
It remained unclear whether the Islamic State directed the attack, was taking responsibility for an assault it inspired or was simply seeking publicity from an event in which it had no direct influence. But no matter the exact connection to organized groups, investigators appear to think that Bouhlel was taking his cues from their message.
The link underscores the difficulty of preventing the spread of extremist ideology in a world where even people like Bouhlel — whose family and neighbors portray him as a troubled loner — can be spurred to attack without training, resources or connections.
“It seems that he radicalized his views very rapidly. These are the first elements that our investigation has come up with through interviews with his acquaintances,” Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Saturday, without offering details.
“We are now facing individuals who are responding positively to the messages issued by the Islamic State without having had any special training and without having access to weapons that allow them to commit mass murder,” Cazeneuve said.
The Amaq news agency, which is linked to the Islamic State, cited an “insider source” in declaring that Bouhlel “was a soldier of the Islamic State.”
“He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State,” the news agency said.
Separately, the Islamic State’s al-Bayan radio station said Bouhlel used “a new tactic” to wreak havoc. “The crusader countries know that no matter how much they enforce their security measures and procedures, it will not stop the mujahideen from striking,” the station said.
But the oblique claim of responsibility left open the question of whether Bouhlel had acted alone or had any prior communication with the group, which has also claimed ties to the
attacks that struck Paris twice last year and
Brussels in March. French authorities have been scrambling to determine whether Bouhlel had a support network in Nice, where he appeared to have been living for at least six years.
Investigators on Saturday detained three people, including one person thought to have spoken to Bouhlel by phone minutes before he started his deadly rampage. Another man was detained late Friday, according to the office of Paris prosecutor François Molins, and authorities had detained Bouhlel’s ex-wife on Friday for questioning.
One focus of the inquiry is Bouhlel’s cellphone, recovered in the cab of the truck he used in the attack. The contacts and call records on the phone can be used to stitch together a portrait of those who may have spoken to Bouhlel in his final days and hours.
Nice, meanwhile, was trying to return to normalcy on Saturday by partially reopening the seaside Promenade des Anglais to traffic. Beaches also reopened, creating a jarring contrast between the tourists frolicking in the gentle Mediterranean surf and the blood-stained pavement above. Mourners dropped flowers on the spots where people had fallen, a route that stretched for more than a mile.
In Paris, President François Hollande convened an emergency meeting of his top security advisers to discuss the investigation.
“The ideologist of Daesh, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, has for several weeks been repeating that it was necessary to attack directly, even individually, French people and Americans wherever they are and by whatever means,” said Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, using an Arabic name for the Islamic State.
“Clearly, certain individuals, such as the driver of that truck, individually responded to this call for committing murder.”
“Even if Daesh doesn’t do the organizing, Daesh inspires a terrorist spirit against which we are organizing,” he said.
The attack has put the deeply unpopular Hollande on the defensive. Right-wing opposition politicians have pressed hard over his handling of security and terrorism.
Christian Estrosi, the center-right president of the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, which includes Nice, wrote in an open letter Saturday that he had asked two weeks ago for additional security during the Bastille Day celebrations. National authorities had turned down the request, he said, because there was no “special alert.”
But Hollande and his allies have rejected any notion that they erred in their security assessments.
“We are at a moment where there are temptations to divide our country,” said Hollande spokesman Stéphane Le Foll.
Cazeneuve said authorities had foiled terrorism plots connected to the European soccer championships that concluded a week ago.
Late Saturday, he urged “all French patriots” to join the national reserve, a measure of the sharp personnel need as French leaders scramble to get more security forces onto streets.
As authorities worked to determine whether Bouhlel was connected to a wider extremist network, an emerging portrait of the killer on Saturday suggested that he was a troubled and isolated man, never fully at home in any of the places, communities and families he had known.
Bouhlel had “psychological problems that caused a nervous breakdown,” his father told French television in comments broadcast Saturday.
“He would become angry, shout, break everything around him,” Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel said in the family’s home town of Msaken, about 75 miles south of Tunis. “We had to take him to the doctor.”
Bouhlel’s arrival in France in 2009 or 2010 — his father could not recall the exact year — did not appear to have given him any peace or stability. He built a rap sheet for petty theft and assault. Although he married and had children, he allegedly beat his wife until she threw him out of their apartment in a low-income complex on the north side of Nice, neighbors said.
After the split with his wife, he found an apartment in Nice’s Abattoirs area, a working-class district named after the city’s former slaughterhouse. It was on an anonymous thoroughfare in a peeling building next to a string of empty storefronts and parking lots.
Neighbors there said they were afraid of Bouhlel. Jasmin Corman, 38, said he had “fixed eyes” that terrified her and her two children, ages 14 and 7.
“He was always alone,” she said.
Standing in the doorway of her apartment on the building’s ground floor — directly below Bouhlel’s first-floor apartment — she recounted on Saturday how he recently stood on the stairwell and silently stared at her as she was locking her door.
“It’s horrifying to realize you were living beneath a murderer,” she said.
Corman, a Muslim who observes Ramadan, said that throughout the Muslim month of fasting, Bouhlel smoked and drank, occasionally returning to the building smelling of alcohol. For Muslims, such behaviors are strictly taboo.
She also noticed him outside the building with a young blonde on more than one occasion. “It was not his daughter. There were caresses,” she said.
Rebab Bouhlel, his sister, said her brother rarely called home to Tunisia but recently had begun to do so more often. “Over the past month,” she told Reuters, “he was calling us every day, and he sent us money.”
“He called several times a day,” she said.
According to Tunisian media, one of those calls was made on the day of the attack. Bouhlel reportedly called his brother to tell him about his troubles, mostly his divorce. Soon, he said, he planned to return to Tunisia.
Rick Noack and Annabell Van den Burghe in Nice and Souad Mekhennet in Frankfurt, Germany, contributed to this report.
