Weeks of planning
Investigators said driver had accomplices, planned for months
The truck driver who killed 84 people on a Nice beachfront had accomplices and appears to have been plotting his attack for months, the Paris prosecutor said Thursday.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said five suspects currently in custody are facing preliminary terrorism charges for their alleged roles in helping 31-yearold Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel in the July 14 attack in the southern French city. Molins’ office, which oversees terrorism investigations, opened a judicial inquiry Thursday into a battery of charges for the suspects, including complicity to murder and possessing weapons tied to a terrorist enterprise.
The suspects are four men – two Franco-Tunisians, a Tunisian and an Albanian – and one woman of dual French-Albanian nationality, Molins said. The driver was a Tunisian man who had been living in Nice for several years.
People close to Bouhlel said he had shown no signs of radicalization until recently. But Molins said information from Bouhlel’s phone showed searches and photos that suggested he could have been preparing an attack as far back as 2015.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though authorities have said they had not found signs that the extremist group directed it.
Earlier Thursday, French officials defended the government’s security measures in Nice on the night of the Bastille Day attack, even as the interior minister acknowledged national police were not, as he had claimed before, stationed at the entrance to closed-off boulevard during the attack.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve’s clarification comes after a newspaper accused French authorities of lacking transparency in their handling of the massacre.
Cazeneuve said Thursday that only local police, who are more lightly armed, were guarding the entrance to the Promenade des Anglais when Bouhlel drove a truck onto the sidewalk in Nice before mowing down pedestrians who had gathered to watch a holiday fireworks show.