Nice attack: Police focus inquiry on killer’s associates

Police investigators are focusing on associates of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Boulhel, the Tunisian lorry driver who killed 84 people on the night of July 14, to establish whether he acted alone or was part of a jihadist network.

Lahouaiej-Boulhel  sent a text message boasting of having purchased a 7.65 calibre pistol and saying  “Bring more weapons” just 18 minutes before he launched down the Promenade des Anglais in a 19-tonne refrigerated lorry.

The massacre was pre-meditated.   Lahouaiej-Boulhel reserved the rental lorry on July 4th, picked it up on July 11th and made trial runs on July 12th and 13th, when he took “selfies” of himself in the cab of the lorry. He sold his car and closed his bank accounts on the eve of the attack.

Eighteen of more than 300 people injured by Lahouaiej-Boulhel are still at risk of dying.  Eighty-five people remain hospitalised.

Six people were in police custody last night in connection with the massacre. They include an Albanian with a record for human trafficking, who is believed to have sold Lahouaiej-Boulhel the pistol he used to fire on police. Another of the detainees received the text message from Lahouaiej-Boulhel.

Estranged wife

The killer’s estranged wife and mother of his three children was released yesterday after two days of questioning. Her lawyer, Jean-Yves Garino, said she was supposed to have gone to the Promenade des Anglais to watch the fireworks.

Lahouaiej-Boulhel’s family and neighbours portray him as unstable and violent. BFMTV reported he was “brutal, megalomaniac and narcissistic” and had many male and female sexual conquests. Police say he watched execution videos on his computer.

Three days of national mourning will end at noon today with a minute’s silence, after which traffic on the Promenade des Anglais will return to normal.

Citing "an attack of a new type" which "shows the extreme difficulty of the anti-terrorist struggle,"  interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve appealed to "French patriots" to join a 12,000-strong "operational reserve" – 9,000 for the paramilitary gendarmerie and 3,000 for the police. The reserve is to be comprised of volunteers during their summer holidays.

‘Trumpisation’ of politics

Nine months before the presidential election, the Bastille Day massacre continues to be a political football. In an interview with the

Journal du Dimanche

, prime minister

Manuel Valls

warned against the “Trumpisation” of French minds, an allusion to the Republican presidential candidate in the US. Mr Valls excoriated “certain irresponsible politicians who say this attack could have been avoided”.

Former president and doubtless future candidate Nicolas Sarkozy told TF1 televison that "everything which could have been done in the last 18 months has not been done. We are in a total war . . . It will be them or us. It's a question of determination."

In particular, Mr Sarkozy criticised French president François Hollande’s administration for having waited so long to make consultation of jihadist websites an offence, and for slowness in establishing “deradicalisation centres”, which are still not in operation. The law against websites was passed only last month, he said, and will not enter into force until October.

Mr Sarkozy mocked Mr Hollande, noting he had announced he was ending the state of emergency in his Bastille Day interview, only to reinstate the measure that same night.

In an Ifop opinion poll for Le Figaro, 67 per cent of respondents had no confidence in Mr Hollande or his government's ability to fight terrorism. In four previous polls since January 2015, approximately half the population questioned the government's competence on terrorism.  The loss of some 17 percentage points indicates the Nice massacre dramatically worsened the perception of French leaders.