Nice city hall puts up names of 84 truck attack victims

Prosecutors said the driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was shot dead at the scene on July 14, and his accomplices appeared to have been plotting the attack for months.

One suspect allegedly sent Bouhlel a Facebook message saying, “Load the truck with tons of iron and cut the brakes”.

On the evening of July 14, thousands of visitors had been returning from a festive firework display for Bastille Day on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, when a truck rammed into the crowd at full speed.

Paris: French police have asked authorities in the city of Nice to destroy CCTV footage that captured last week’s truck attack that killed 84 people.

Paris Prosecutor François Molins laid out a timeline with evidence the attacker and his suspected accomplices had embraced Islamist extremism as early as the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015.

Like Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, none of the accomplices were known to French intelligence services, Mr. Molins said.

While the Islamic State group claimed the attack, describing Bouhlel as a “soldier”, investigators have not found direct proof of his allegiance to the jihadists.

A suspect had filmed the aftermath of the attack, the Paris prosecutor said.

Molins said Bouhlel and Mohamed Oualid G., a 40-year-old French-Tunisian, called each other 1 278 times between July 2015 and July 2016.

The 31-year-old man seemed to “have planned his criminal project several months before passing to act”, he added. “They have brought in the soldiers of Allah to finish the job”.

People close to Bouhlel said he had shown no signs of radicalization until very recently. The links between Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel and the detained individuals, were also apparent in the supply of arms as well as evidence collected from the lorry.

The message read: “I am not Charlie”.

Police shot Bouhlel to death after he barreled down the crowded Promenade des Anglais for nearly a mile, crushing and hitting people who had gathered to watch fireworks.

In May previous year, he took a photo of an article about the drug Captagon, an amphetamine used by jihadists in Syria.

Mr Hollande said the equipment will be in place next month, as part of French efforts to boost its participation in the US-led fight against IS, which claimed responsibility for the Nice attack.

Nice police department chief Adolphe Colrat, who answers to central government rather than the regional politicians who are leading the criticism, said the authorities had “at no time” lied or misled people on policing arrangements.

After the newspaper Liberation raised questions about the extent of security, how many police and what level of police were present on the promenade, the French Interior Ministry opened Thursday a “technical inquiry” to try to head off speculation.