‘He was not a Muslim, he was a sh**’: Death driver identified as France mourns
TERRORIST Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel sent his family $150,000 days before carrying out the shocking attack in Nice, France.
WARNING: Graphic images
FOUR police vans that blocked off the Promenade des Anglais in Nice where 84 people were mowed down and another 200 injured were reportedly removed hours before the attack.
The police vans were in place to protect a military parade earlier in the day but were removed before Thursday’s attack, eyewitnesses say according to the UK’s Telegraph.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, opened fire on a crowd of Bastille Day fireworks spectators as he ploughed through them in a truck until he was killed by police on Nice’s seaside boulevard.
Five people have since been arrested in relation to the attack.
Overnight Bouhlel’s family revealed he had sent $150,000 just days before the atrocity.
“Mohamed sent the family 240,000 Tunisian Dinars ($150,000) in the last few days,” his brother Jaber Bouhlel told the Daily Mail.
“He used to send us small sums of money regularly like most Tunisians working abroad. But then he sent us all that money, it was fortune.
“He sent the money illegally. He gave cash to people he knew who were returning to our village and asked them to give it to the family.”
IS has since claimed responsibility for the attack.
Echoing his father’s thoughts that Bouhel was “volatile” and “depressed”, Jaber said his brother was not a terrorist, but mentally ill.
Bouhlel wasn’t known to intelligence services, but was no stranger to police. A relative of his wife’s said “He was not a Muslim. He was a s***’.
French authorities say the attack bore the hallmarks of Islamic militants, and were previously trying to determine if he acted alone, according to Reuters.
However there were reports on Saturday evening AEST claim that five people have been taken into custody over the attack.
According to local reports, the group is believed to be linked to the 31-year-old driver of the truck.
A cousin of Bouhlel’s wife described him as a “nasty piece of work” who beat his wife and was not a Muslim.
He was a dual Tunisian-French national who lived in Nice.
“Bouhlel was not religious. He did not go to the mosque, he did not pray, he did not observe Ramadan,” Walid Hamou, a cousin of Bouhlel’s wife Hajer Khalfallah, told MailOnline.
“He drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs. This is all forbidden under Islam. He was not a Muslim, he was a s***. He beat his wife, my cousin, he was a nasty piece of work.”
Despite the fact he was not religious, the Islamic State has officially claimed responsibility for the massacre calling Bouhlel a ‘soldier’ of the group.
French police have raided his home and held his wife for questioning.
Police had previously said that they had formally identified the man, after finding ID cards in the truck he used to kill 84 people, during Nice’s Bastille Day celebrations. He was shot dead by police.
The Bastille Day horror marked the country’s third major terror attack within 18 months.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader of the National Front party, called on Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to step down.
“In any other country in the world, a minister with a toll as horrendous as Bernard Cazeneuve — 250 dead in 18 months — would have quit,” she said.
THE TOLL
The death toll stands at 84.
Just one day after Bouhlel’s deadly drive, French President Francois Hollande said that about 80 people are hovering “between life and death” and in a critical state, of the more than 200 injured in the attack.
An estimated 53 people are in critical care, 25 of those in intensive care, French prosecutor François Molins said.
At least 10 children and teenagers are among the dead.
Five Australians received minor injuries in the attack.
Canberra’s ambassador in Paris, Stephen Brady said five young Australians had been injured in the atrocity while trying to get away from the scene.
One of them, a young Australian woman on a Topdeck tour, has been released from hospital and rejoined her tour group.
“The doctors have given her the green light. She genuinely is OK,” Topdeck media spokesman Karl Webster told AAP.
He said the woman was “pretty shaken” after suffering a minor injury as she tried to get out of the way of the truck as people fled in panic on Thursday night.
Bronte Stuntz, 18, this morning appeared on the Today Show and revealed she woke up in a pool of blood surrounded by bodies after she was struck by the body of a man who was hit by the truck.
Ms Stuntz said she blacked out on impact.
“I woke up with my friend holding my head and when I looked around I was the only person on the ground that was alive,” she said.
“Everyone was dead around me.”
The Sydney teenager sustained injuries to the left side of her body, including her foot, leg, back and shoulder.
She has been released from hospital and is using a wheelchair until she recovers.
“I never thought I’d have to witness the amount of dead bodies and blood I saw that day,” she said.
Marcus Anderson, also from Sydney, was walking down the street with three friends when the truck smashed into his back. The driver shot him in the arm as he fell to the ground, sustaining three broken ribs and a collapsed lung.
“I’m so glad all my friends are safe and I feel so bad for the others,” he told The Today Show.
His father is on his way to Nice to be with Mr Anderson.
Mr Brady said an Australian man and a woman, both in their early 20s, remained in hospital in satisfactory conditions and were “both doing OK”.
“We were very lucky because a lot of Australians now use Nice as their point of entry into France,” Mr Brady said.
“We are advising Australians coming to France to exercise a high degree of caution.”
Next week at Fromelles and Pozieres in northern France many Australians are expected at the centenary commemorations of World War I battles in which thousands of Australians fought and died. Mr Brady said that following the Nice attack, embassy staff had been in touch with French authorities regarding security at those events and “had been assured that the right resources required will be deployed”.
WHO IS HE?
Investigators are building a profile of Bouhlel who worked as a delivery driver and was described ‘a depressive loner’.
His father said he had suffered from depression and had “no links” to religion.
“From 2002 to 2004, he had problems that caused a nervous breakdown. He would become angry and he shouted ... he would break anything he saw in front of him,” Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej-Bouhlel told AFP outside his home in Msaken, eastern Tunisia.
“We are also shocked,” he said, adding that he had not seen his son since he left for France but was not entirely sure when this was.
He said his son was a depressed man who, in Tunisia, took prescription medication to calm fits of anger. He was not religious, neither praying nor fasting during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and was “always alone.”
He said his son had not been home in four years.
Bouhlel and his wife had three children, but she had demanded a divorce after a ‘violent argument’, one neighbour said.
Moulins said he was known to police and the courts due to threats, violence and petty theft between 2010 and 2016”.
In March, he was convicted for a road-rage crime when he struck another motorist with a wooden pallet but received a suspended six-month sentence because it was his first proven offence.
He had also been detained for “voluntary violence with a weapon and that was in January 2016”.
Authorities were “not aware that he had ever shown a sign of radicalisation”.
But Molins said the attack was “exactly in line with” calls from jihadist groups to kill
Investigators are still searching to see if he was working with accomplices.
The 19-ton truck he used for his deadly rampage through the terrified crowd for two kilometres was rented on July 11, and was due back on the 13th.
Inside the cabin, there were automatic fire weapons, two Kalashnikov rifles, bullets and a grenade. A mobile phone, a driver’s licence and bank details were also found.
AFP reporters interviewed about a dozen neighbours of the man.
They portrayed him as a solitary figure who rarely spoke and did not even return greetings when their paths crossed in the four-storey block, located in a working-class neighbourhood of Nice.
Sebastien, a neighbour who spoke on condition that his full name was not used, said Bouhlel did not seem overtly religious, often dressed in shorts and sometimes wore work boots.
He had a van parked nearby and owned a bike, which he brought up into his first-floor apartment.
Police investigators and forensic experts entered his apartment around 9.30am (local time) with an armed police intervention unit in support, and brought out bags of material later.
‘FRANCE IS IN TEARS’
France has begun three days of official mourning following the attack President Francois Hollande has declared the attack was of “an undeniable terrorist nature.”
Meanwhile, passengers evacuated from Nice airport overnight were allowed to return and pick up their luggage, a reporter at the scene said. The airport had earlier been cleared of people.
Sky News reported the hospital treating children injured in the attack in Nice as saying it had been unable to trace some of their parents.
President Hollande has addressed the nation and announced thousands of troops and police will be mobilised in the wake of the attack. The country’s state of emergency — which was due to end on July 26 — has been extended for three months.
“This is a monstrosity to use a truck to deliberately kill people, many people, who only came out to celebrate their national day,” Hollande said. “France is in tears, she is hurting but she is strong. She will be stronger.”
The attack in the Riviera city plunged France again into grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.
Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, have shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.
THE SCENE
The seaside promenade in the French city of Nice where Bouhlel murdered at least 84 people remains closed.
Street cleaners are still at work, and the Promenade des Anglais is now a place of grieving, with bouquets of flowers piling up as residents, some with candles, pay tribute to the dead.
One resident, Robert Canon, a lawyer in his 60s, said that he had witnessed the aftermath of the attack.
Canon said that “there were bodies all over the place. Too many. I couldn’t bear to stay and watch. I saw children’s pushchairs and toys too. It was horrible.” He said that normally the promenade and the beach would be full of tourists. On Friday evening it as almost empty.
Most of the dead were French, but there were also at least three Germans, two Americans and one Russian national, as well as Tunisians and Algerians. A number of Britons were also caught up in the attack.
Witnesses have described “running over bodies”. A French journalist at the scene said: “I saw bodies flying like bowling pins along its route. Heard noises, cries that I will never forget.”
A man who witnessed the attack told CNN he saw the driver accelerate and aim for people as the vehicle slammed the crowd. The truck continued about 2km through the city’s busy main road, mowing down people in its path.
The driver then emerged from the truck and opened fire on the crowd, another eyewitness said. French media is now reporting the gunman got back in the driver’s seat and travelled to another populated area before starting to shoot again.
Police remain on the scene of the attack.
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