Nice attacker led multiple lives

Dancing, drugs and extremism

PARIS, July 24, (Agencies): A 31-year-old father of three obsessed with fitness and sex, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel led multiple lives. His darkest side appears to have been his best-kept secret: a calculated, committed jihadi ready to kill scores of people in a French Riviera rampage.

Information emerging from authorities and people who knew him suggests Bouhlel concealed his different worlds from each other, and may have been following Islamic State guidance to blend in and hide his radicalism while he plotted violence.

There was his family life — three children under 6, including an 18-month-old born just after his wife split with Bouhlel, accusing him of frequent abuse.

Then there was his erratic social life: smoking pot with acquaintances in the Tunisian immigrant community; martial arts training and possible steroid use to bulk up muscle; salsa dancing to pick up women; and a reported male lover in his 70s.

And now, it appears that Bouhlel had an extremist life, too, built up over months as he prepared for the Bastille Day attack.

His parallel worlds are complicating investigators’ efforts to figure out who he was, who might have helped with the attack, whether other violence was planned. They may never have a definitive answer: Bouhlel was killed by police after ramming his truck through a family-filled crowd enjoying fireworks.

Authorities initially said Bouhlel had radicalized very quickly. Family and neighbors described him as indifferent to religion, volatile and prone to drinking sprees.

But on Thursday, Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said investigators found images in Bouhlel’s phone suggesting he was premeditating an attack as far back as a year ago.

Molins said Bouhlel studied Captagon, a drug used by some jihadis before attacks. He had a screenshot of a previous vehicle attack in a crowd. He

ing a four-year inquiry.

His identity and details about who purchased the weapons have been withheld. obtained weapons through a string of acquaintances.

Authorities say Bouhlel drew inspiration from IS propaganda, though there is no sign the attack was commandeered by the extremist group’s bases in Syria or Iraq.

Yet his turn to extremism went unnoticed by relatives, neighbors and acquaintances. And police and prosecutors investigating Bouhlel for a road rage incident in early 2016 saw no reason to flag him as a potential risk.

A French security official said this may have been intentional, in response to IS suggestions to some followers in the West that they hide their radical faith to stay off police radar. Attackers who targeted Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016 are believed to have done the same.

A lawyer for one of five suspects given preliminary terrorism charges in the case says he believes Bouhlel radicalized alone.

Lawyer Jean-Pascal Padovani said his client, Ramzi A., and Bouhlel were from the world of “small-scale delinquence . ... They smoked pot together. It was that kind of relationship.”

Idea

Ramzi was on Nice’s seaside Promenade des Anglais the night that Bouhlel’s truck careened down the cordoned-off boulevard. But his lawyer insists he was there to have fun, and had no idea what Bouhlel planned to do.

Vladis Selevanov, who works as a cook in Nice, said he had gone to different gyms with Bouhlel for about four years, yet didn’t know he was married and a father. Selevanov and others who worked out with Bouhlel described him as a loner. “He was strange, but not at all aggressive.”

Guys at the gym nicknamed him “Arnold,” as in Schwarzenegger, because he was so muscular, yet he had an incongruously high-pitched voice. He seemed obsessed with his appearance, always clean-shaven, hair gelled backward even during workouts - and was always wearing flip-flops, Selevanov

A resident on the island of Ibiza who hid behind tight security, the suspect had been posing as an economic adviser to the prime said.

Bouhlel used his two middle names when he signed a petition to get their gym to stay open until 11pm. When he discovered it offered salsa lessons, he joined with gusto, Selevanov said, bragging about how it was a good way to meet women.

“He always hit on all girls, old, young,” Selevanov said.

Performed

Bouhlel also performed at salsa nights at the Restaurant de la Victorine near the Nice airport, according to people who worked there, and trained in a smattering of martial arts, leaving the impression of a strong but somewhat undisciplined fighter.

His opponent in a 2010 karate tournament described him as a novice, making mistakes because he was stressed and not a seasoned fighter.

A video of the fight, obtained by The Associated Press, shows Bouhlel sparring powerfully, and occasionally going overboard — at one point headbutting and at another kneeing his opponent in the crotch. Between each round, Bouhlel respectfully bowed.

A man who trained Bouhlel in Satori martial art described Bouhlel as always polite and calm, yet he was fired from a delivery company for inappropriate behavior.

The opponent and the trainer spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their security.

French media reports say Bouhlel’s cell phone indicated he had homosexual flings. Selevanov said Bouhlel was known to have had a long-term relationship with a male gym-goer in his 70s. The prosecutor said he had an “unbridled sex life,” but security officials wouldn’t comment on specific male relationships.

Selevanov described working out on a treadmill with Bouhlel a few weeks ago in the Moving Express gym, in a neighborhood near Nice’s renowned Marc Chagall Museum, when he found him unusually friendly.

“He came up to say ‘hi, how’s it going?’” Selevanov said in an interview.

minister of the West African state of GuineaBissau and used a fake diplomatic passport, a police spokesman told AFP. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard (what happened July 14). We are shocked. Completely shocked.”

France’s interior minister is protesting accusations the government tried to cover up security failings the night of the Bastille Day attack in Nice that killed 84.

The woman in charge of video surveillance in Nice on July 14, Sandra Bertin, told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that government officials told her what to write in her report and that she should mention the presence of police she hadn’t seen.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in a statement Sunday that he is suing for alleged defamation and said he is committed to uncovering the truth about what happened.

Many French are angry that the government couldn’t prevent the Nice attack despite a state of emergency in place.

Cazeneuve acknowledged that no national police were protecting the beachfront promenade targeted in the attack.

Meanwhile, a senior policewoman claimed Sunday that France’s interior minister pressured her to alter a report into security at the Nice fireworks display where 84 were killed when a man rammed a lorry into the crowd.

But the minister, Bernard Cazeneuve — whose account of police deployments on the night of July 14 has already faced questions — hit back at the “grave accusations” and said he would sue for defamation.

Sandra Bertin, who is in charge of Nice’s system of security cameras, told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper she had been “harassed for an hour” by Cazeneuve on the phone after he sent a commissioner to see her.

She said she had been told to detail the presence of the local police at the Bastille Day fireworks event and also to report “that the national police had also been deployed at two points”.

“The national police were perhaps there, but I couldn’t see them on the video,” Bertin told the newspaper.

His base in Ibiza was a luxury seaview villa, with a plaque on the gates that described the site as being consular territory, which thus had diplomatic immunity, they said. He headed an international network of front firms with links in Belgium, France, Germany and Britain whose headquarters were based in tax havens.

The gang used the firms to procure weapons, notably in Eastern Europe, and a Polish company owned by the suspect acted as a go-between with the buyers, the spokesman said.

The Pole, arrested with eight others, allegedly used the Gambian presidential plane for one of his trips.

He is under suspicion of arms running, money-laundering, tax evasion and extorting millions of dollars from Spanish businesses.

The arrests — part of a joint operation with EU law enforcement agency Europol — coincided with raids in Germany and Switzerland, Spanish police said, adding they had searched several Ibiza residences and impounded a number of luxury cars.

South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011, but in 2013 a power struggle broke out between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar.

The resulting civil war left tens of thousands of people dead.

A peace agreement was reached in August 2015 but the country remains chronically unstable. (AFP)