31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the truck driver who killed 84 people on a Nice beachfront had accomplices and appears to have been plotting his attack for months, Francois Molins, the Paris prosecutor said on Thursday.
Citing cryptic phone messages, more than 1,000 calls and video of the attack scene on the phone of one of five people facing terror-linked charges, Molins said the probe so far reveals he had “help and complicity” and demonstrates the participating of the five ahead of the attack.
At this stage of the investigation, the prosecutor said, Bouhlel “seemed to have envisaged and ripened his criminal project several months before taking action,” he said.
Molins added that the five suspects currently in custody face preliminary terrorism charges for their alleged roles in helping Bouhlel in the 14 July attack in the southern French city.
Molins’ office, which oversees terrorism investigations, opened a judicial inquiry Thursday into a battery of charges for the suspects, including complicity to murder and possessing weapons tied to a terrorist enterprise.
The suspects are four men – two Franco-Tunisians, a Tunisian and an Albanian – and one woman of dual French-Albanian nationality, Molins said. The driver was a Tunisian man who had been living in Nice for several years.
People close to Bouhlel said he had shown no signs of radicalization until very recently. But Molins said information from Bouhlel’s phone showed searches and photos that suggested he could have been preparing an attack as far back as 2015.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, though authorities have said they had not found signs that the extremist group directed it.
Bouhlel was killed by police after barreling his 19-ton truck down Nice’s famed Promenade des Anglais for some two kilometers.
Bouhlel and a 30-year-old French-Tunisian with no previous convictions had phoned each other 1,218 times in a year, Molins said. Four days earlier, the prosecutor said, a text message from the same man found on a phone seized at Bouhlel’s said: “I’m not Charlie; I’m happy. They have brought in the soldiers of Allah.”
The message was dated three days after the January 2015 newsroom massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical publication, and the worldwide movement of solidarity for the victims and France, “I’m Charlie.”
Hours after the attack, the same man filmed the bloody scene on the promenade.
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