Before Nice attack, driver had signs of psychosis
MSAKEN, Tunisia — His own parents were so frightened by his violence that they kicked him out when he was 16. Desperate, by the time he was 19, they dragged him to a psychiatrist, who prescribed an antipsychotic drug, a tranquilizer and an antidepressant.
“There were the beginnings of a psychosis,” the doctor, Hamouda Chemceddine, recalled in an interview in the Tunisian city of Sousse, looking over his notes from that visit in August 2004. “He wasn’t someone who was living in the real world.”
In France, he even created a Facebook page with an alter ego, listing his profession as a “professor of salsa dancing” and displaying a mock image of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, in drag.
That man — a 31-year-old delivery driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel — trained his violent tendencies on a crowd watching fireworks along the French Riviera on July 14, running over hundreds of people and killing 84 in a rented cargo truck during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice.
Since then, all of France has struggled to explain the single most murderous act yet committed by an individual since the country’s wave of terror began. Was Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s rampage terrorism or merely the outburst of a madman? Or both?
The Islamic State quickly proclaimed him a “soldier.” Yet Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s life — pieced together in numerous interviews in France and Tunisia, where he was born and raised — showed few signs of real radicalization, and certainly no Islamic zeal.
Instead, it showed plenty of signs of verging psychosis and a hair-trigger propensity for violence by a man variously described as a drinker, a wife beater, a drug taker and a chronic womanizer.
“He danced, he smoked, he ate pork. It was almost as though he wasn’t even Muslim,” Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s brother Jaber, 19, said in an interview outside the family home in Msaken, Tunisia. “He didn’t even pray.”
Rather, Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s life appears to show the ways in which the unstable and aggrieved have latched on to Islamic State propaganda to shape their violent fixations and find permission to act them out.
In turn, the Islamic State has latched on to them, declaring as its foot soldiers even individuals with tenuous ties to the group but long histories of personal and psychological troubles who are far from models of Islamic rectitude.
It remains unclear what led Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel to his murderous rampage. But his killings have left the French authorities, like those elsewhere, struggling to define the intersection of political terrorism and personal psychoses.
The Paris prosecutor, Francois Molins, said Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had prepared his massacre for several months with the help of at least five accomplices, who were arrested.
One was Tunisian, two had dual French and Tunisian citizenship, and two were from Albania. All were charged with, among other things, terrorist conspiracy on accusations that they egged on Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel and helped him get a gun and rent the truck he used.
But none, including Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, appeared linked to the Islamic State in a meaningful way, Mr. Molins said, despite apparently following its exhortations to kill the enemy, including to “run him over with your car.”
Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s violent outburst was not that surprising to people in his old neighborhood in Msaken, a bustling suburb of Sousse with a tennis club and a picturesque mosque. He was raised as one of three sons and six daughters born to a hardworking and fairly prosperous farmer and property owner.
Instead, the neighbors felt shame, and many were resisting having him buried in this town, a local official said. No one mentioned his having the slightest allegiance to extremist Islam.
Like many adolescents, Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel appeared concerned over his physical appearance. But the young man sitting in front of him obsessed over it.
“He wasn’t satisfied with the image of his body,” Dr. Chemceddine said. “‘I am ugly,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to build myself up.’ ”
“He seemed strange to me,” Dr. Chemceddine added. “He had an altered perception of reality.”