Daesh claim may be a publicity stunt
FRENCH AUTHORITIES SCRAMBLING TO DETERMINE WHETHER BOUHLEL ACTED ALONE
Daesh yesterday claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 84 people in this coastal French city, the organisation’s news agency said, as French prosecutors took four more people into custody in connection with the attack.
It remained unclear whether Daesh had directed the attack, whether they were taking responsibility for an attack that they may have inspired, or whether they were simply seeking publicity from an attack entirely disconnected from them. The Daesh-connected Amaq news agency cited an “insider source” saying that Mohammad Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “was a soldier of the Daesh”.
“He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Daesh,” the news agency wrote.
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 acted alone or had a support network in Nice, where he appears to have been living for at least six years.
Investigators yesterday detained three additional people in connection with the attack, including one person who is believed to have spoken to Bouhlel by phone minutes before he started his deadly journey down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, local media reported, adding that an additional man was detained late on Friday. Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said that police had detained Bouhlel’s ex-wife and were questioning her.
Nice, meanwhile, was trying to return to normal yesterday by reopening the seaside Promenade des Anglais to traffic 36 hours after Bouhlel turned it into a killing field.
Beaches were also set to reopen, even as flowers and tributes piled up at a makeshift memorial near the spot where the deadly truck came to a halt. French President Francois Hollande convened an emergency meeting of his top security advisers to discuss the investigation.
The scale of the carnage wrought by Bouhlel came into grim focus on Friday, with 10 children among the dead and 202 people injured. Among the wounded, 50 were “between life and death,” according to Hollande.
The attack with a 19-tonne rented Renault truck — the third mass casualty assault to hit to France in 18 months — shocked the nation and sparked questions about whether authorities had done enough to safeguard a country that is an obvious target of terrorist groups.
Many witnesses said on Friday that the packed corniche had been only lightly guarded by police during fireworks on the gently warm night.
Bouhlel, a truck driver, was easily able to drive around police fences blocking Nice’s famous Promenade des Anglais before jamming on the accelerator and zigzagging his way through the crowds in a method that seemed calculated to generate maximum bloodshed.
The identities of the victims testified to France’s diverse society and to the international appeal of the French Riviera. A vacationing father and his 11-year-old son from Lakeway, Texas. A headscarf-wearing Muslim woman who came to celebrate Bastille Day with her nieces and nephews. A French high schoolteacher, his wife, daughter and grandson. Others from Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Australia.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Friday drew a strong link to terrorism, despite the fact that no militant group had claimed responsibility for the attack and Bouhlel had no known ties to such organisations.
France was shaken by a terrorist attack in January 2015, when militant Islamist attackers took aim at Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a kosher grocery store in Paris.
Attackers struck again in November in a popular nightclub district of the capital, setting off bombs and raking the area with gunfire.