Load the truck with 2,000 tons and release brakes
What accomplice told Nice killer... as it’s revealed he had FIVE helpers and terror attack was planned for over a year
THE Bastille Day lorry killer had plotted his atrocity for more than a year and had the help of at least five others, French prosecutors said yesterday. Four men and a woman are accused of being ‘involved in the preparation’ of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s attack that left 84 dead when he drove into crowds at a Nice fireworks display.
One accomplice sent a chilling Facebook message to Bouhlel saying: ‘Load the truck with 2,000 tons of iron ... release the brakes my friend and I will watch.’ Another filmed the aftermath of the carnage on the Promenade Des Anglais the day after the attack.
French authorities are now under pressure to explain their security failings after prosecutor Francois Molins said information on Bouhlel’s phone confirms he was planning the atrocity as far back as the middle of 2015.
Evidence on the phone includes photos ‘zooming in’ on crowds attending fireworks displays in Nice last summer.
Bouhlel was shot dead immediately after last week’s attack, but five suspects connected to him remain in custody and face a range of anti-terrorism charges.
They are an Albanian and his Franco-Albanian wife, two Franco-Tunisians, and a Tunisian. Bouhlel was a Tunisian national, who was in France on a ten-year residency permit given to him after his marriage to a French national in 2009.
None of the suspects was known to intelligence services, and only the Franco-Tunisian known as Ramzi A, 22, who was born in Nice, had a criminal record, for robbery and drug offences.
Ramzi led police to discover a Kalashnikov and a bag of ammunition yesterday, however their purpose was unclear. More than 400 investigators have been poring over evidence since the attack, and it was analyses of Bouhlel’s phone that led them to the five suspects.
While Islamic State claimed the attack, investigators have not found direct proof of Bouhlel’s allegiance to the jihadists. However initial details of the investigation show his fascination with jihad had existed for a while. On May 26 last year he took a photo of an article about the drug Captagon, an amphetamine used by jihadists in Syria.
In July 2015 he took photos of the crowd at the Bastille Day fireworks display, as well as another crowd watching a concert on the Promenade Des Anglais three days later.
On April 4 this year the Tunisian suspect, Chokri C, 37, sent Bouhlel a Facebook message reading: ‘Load the truck with 2,000 tons of iron... release the brakes my friend and I will watch.’
Investigators also found a text in Bouhlel’s phone from Tunisian suspect Mohamed Oualid, 40, referring to the deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine which spawned the hashtag ‘I am Charlie’. The message read: ‘I am not Charlie ... I am happy they have brought soldiers of Allah to finish the job.’