Islamic State
claimed responsibility on Saturday for the truck attack that killed at
least 84 people celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice and
police arrested three more people there in connection with the seafront
carnage.
“The person who
carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of
the soldiers of Islamic State,” the Amaq news agency affiliated with
the militant Islamist group said on its Telegram account.
“He
carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of
states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State.”
French
authorities have yet to produce any evidence that the 31 year-old
Tunisian killer, shot dead by police in the attack, had turned to
radical Islam. Nevertheless, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said
that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel may have undergone a rapid change.
“It
seems that he was radicalised very quickly — in any case these are the
elements that have come up from the testimony of the people around
him,” Cazeneuve told reporters.
Speaking
from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel’s sister told Reuters he had
been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005.
Other relatives and friends interviewed in Nice doubted he had militant Islamist leanings.
Saturday’s
arrests concerned his “close entourage”, police sources said. Two other
people, including the attacker’s wife, had already been detained.
Bouhlel had been in France for 10 years and lived locally.
He
drove at the crowd in the Riviera city on Thursday night, zig-zagging
along the seafront Promenade des Anglais for two kilometers as a
fireworks display marking the French national day ended, until police
eventually shot him dead.
Reuters
