The man responsible for Thursday evening’s murderous attack in Nice appears to have been a violent petty criminal, unknown to the French security services, who was born in Tunisia but living and working in the coastal city.
The man – who was shot dead by police after killing 84 people and injuring scores more – has been named locally as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.
According to widespread French media reports, the 31-year-old was a delivery driver from the town of M’saken, near the city of Sousse where dozens of foreign tourists were shot dead on a beach last year. He had reportedly last visited the town four years ago.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was shot dead by two police officers at the end of his deadly Bastille Day rampage on the Promenade des Anglais, after apparently opening fire with a pistol. An inactive grenade was also found in the truck.
The married father of three was reported to have had a long criminal record and little apparent interest in religion. Echoing the remarks of French officials, security sources in Tunisia said he was not known by the Tunisian authorities to hold radical or Islamist views.
The first clues to the Nice attacker’s identity emerged quickly in the immediate aftermath of the attack. As police combed through the bullet-riddled vehicle, rented from a truck hire location not far from Nice, they recovered a mobile phone, bank card and driver’s licence – all pointing to the same individual.
That was Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a man known to the authorities for domestic violence, theft and violent assault with a weapon who, it seems, had last been convicted in March.
According to sources in the French police and reports in the French media, the refrigerated truck used in the attack, which drove into crowds on the city's sea front, was rented two days ago in Saint-Laurent-du-Var, close to Nice.
That find quickly led officers from the elite RAID unit – which deals with violent crime and terrorism – to a modest five-storey apartment block in the Quartier des Abattoirs. Police broke into a first-floor apartment at 9.30 am on Friday.
According to those who knew the attacker he had only acquired his heavy vehicle licence relatively recently – within the last year to 18 months – as details emerged of the steps he would have had to have taken to hire the vehicle used in the attack.
Those would have included paying a substantial deposit of about €2,000 suggesting – as French security officials have claimed – a large degree of premeditation.
Investigators will also want to know where he acquired weapons found in the cab of the truck. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s neighbours described him as a quiet and “not very religious” man.
Rarely spoke
Speaking to reporters in the apartment building, they said he rarely spoke and did not return greetings when their paths crossed in the working-class neighbourhood of city.
Among them was Sebastien, a neighbour who spoke on condition that his full name was not used, who said Lahouaiej-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.
Of those who were interviewed, only one, a neighbour on the ground floor, said she had had any concerns about him – describing him as “a good-looking man who kept giving my two daughters the eye”. Other people who knew him – quoted in the French media – described an individual interested in girls and salsa music.
Another neighbour, identified only as Jasmine, aged 40, told the Guardian: "He was quite handsome, greyish hair, looked a bit like George Clooney. He never answered when we spoke or said hello, he just sort of stared at us aggressively.
“I was really scared of him. All I knew is that he had trouble with his wife, but we never saw her or their kids. He spent a lot of his time at a bar down the street where he gambled and drank.”
Others who knew him said they believed he was either divorced or in the process of getting divorced. Police raided the 12th-floor apartment of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s estranged wife, elsewhere in the city, where neighbours said he had not lived for three years.
There also were conflicting reports as to whether Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a French citizen of Tunisian birth or, as later reports said, a Tunisian citizen living in France on a work permit.
Parallels
Commentators and anti-terrorism experts, however, were quick to see parallels with others who have been involved in attacks in Europe, including Mohamed Merah, who launched gun attacks in Toulouse and Montauban in 2012, and shared the same background of petty crime before he was radicalised.
Anti-terrorism investigators – to whom the case was handed on Friday – will now need to focus on establishing whether the attacker acted alone and what motivated him to launch his murderous assault.
In practical terms, too, police will have questions to answer, including how – amid a high-level security alert and state of emergency – he was able to get through a security perimeter to launch his attack.
“Investigations are currently under way to establish if the individual acted alone or if he had accomplices who might have fled,” interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said, announcing the investigation.
One of a community of 40,000 Tunisians living in Nice – among a wider community of 120,000 in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region – he was not, say neighbours in the Quartier des Abattoirs, a familiar figure in the 18 or so mosques in the city.
Instead, say neighbours, his interests were more worldly. All of which inspires the questions – in what way, and where, was he radicalised?
One focus of the investigation is likely to look at connections in Nice itself – a city which has in recent years emerged as a centre of radicalisation and jihadi recruitment, not least through the network of Omar Omsen, also known as Oumar Diaby, whose name has repeatedly surfaced in French counter-terrorism investigations.
Guardian service