July 17, 2016

OVER 80 DEAD IN TERRORIST ATTACK IN SOUTH OF FRANCE.






Truck Plows Into Crowd; Hollande Calls Act Terrorism‘Nobody in the Way Stood a Chance’ 



  • The attack occurred during the annual Bastille Day fireworks on the promenade in Nice on Thursday.
  • Officials said that at least 84 people had been killed, with hundreds injured. President François Hollande called France a “target.” The driver, a 31-year-old French Tunisian who worked as a truck driver, was known to police, then got out and sprayed fleeing revelers with bullets before being shot dead by police. A local official said the truck was “loaded with arms and grenades.” He was evidently completely unknown to French intelligence. 
  • Bouhlel was convicted only once, for assault in a fight after a traffic accident. In January 2016, he was ordered to avoid contact with the victim and pay a 1,000-euro fine, and received a six-month suspended sentence. He was not under any court order or surveillance at the time of the attack.Bouhlel rented the truck on July 11, according to Molins, and was supposed to return it July 13.
  • "We don’t yet know if [the driver] had accomplices, but we are hoping that his identification will offer us more leads,” Hollande said.
  • A scene of laughter and cheers and then, suddenly, shock and despair, and bodies scattered along a road. Crowds had gathered along the promenade to watch a fireworks display for the French holiday. A reporter from Agence France-Presse saw a white truck driving at high speed, hitting pedestrians and sending debris into the air. 
  • The French-Tunesian man drove at possibly as fast as 70mph through Bastille Day celebrations on the seafront promenade in Nice, firing at revelers who had gathered to watch the fireworks. 
    Officials said the driver wove along the seafront, knocking people down “like skittles at a bowling alley”. Two Americans are reportedly among the dead. Video footage showed the 19-ton white truck speeding up as it drove into screaming crowds on the city’s Promenade des Anglais while several people tried to chase it on foot.
    Parents threw their children aside to safety as it bore down on them.Maryam Violet, a journalist on holiday in the Mediterranean city, told the Guardian. “I was walking for nearly a mile and there were dead bodies all over the place.”
    Dawn revealed pools of dried blood, smashed children’s strollers, an uneaten baguette and other debris strewn about. The children’s hospital in Nice said it had treated some 50 children and adolescents. Some were still in critical condition on Friday.


People brought flowers on Friday to the site of the previous night’s attack in Nice, France.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

  • July 15, 2016

Many French wondered how the driver could have swept past police checkpoints at an event that clearly demanded high security. On another level, there was soul-searching once again about France’s overall security strategy.
  • Mr. Bouhlel, a heavyset 31-year-old from Tunisia, appeared not to have left behind any public declaration of his motives or indicated any allegiance to an extremist group. He lived on the 12th floor of a high rise in a heavily immigrant housing project and was known to his neighbors only as a moody and aggressive oddball. He never went to the local mosque, often grunted in response to greetings of “bonjour” and sometimes beat his wife — until she threw him out. the ongoing investigation would determine whether the suspect had acted alone, possibly because of he was psychologically “unbalanced,” or whether he was linked to a terrorist network.
    Residents in his former apartment building on a hill overlooking the city said they had never seen him at the local mosque and never heard him mention religion.
    Indeed, they said he rarely spoke at all and seemed to be in a permanent haze of anger, particularly after his marriage fell apart.


 Little  in Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s past indicated he would commit an atrocity on the scale of Thursday’s attack. Investigators will want to know where he acquired the stash of weapons found in the cab of the truck, whether he was indeed acting alone or had accomplices – and, perhaps above all, what motivated him to launch his murderous assault. He had a kind of road rage incident earlier this year. So they're looking at his mental stability as well as some sort of jihadist connection.
 Often in these kinds of cases, when ISIS is involved, they find small ISIS flags in the car or near the suspects. In this case, as far as is known, they haven't found anything like that. In the cab of the truck there was a semiautomatic handgun. There was some ammunition and, strangely - and they haven't explained this yet - two assault rifle replicas - fake - fake assault rifles.

 Flowers and a teddy bear are set around a photograph of a small boy killed in the attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.
July 16, 2016

 The Islamic State claimed on Saturday that the man who attacked the seaside city of Nice was one of the group’s “soldiers.” France’s defense minister promptly blamed the terrorist network for inspiring the assault, while its top law enforcement official said the attacker, who was not previously known to intelligence agencies, may have “radicalized himself very quickly.”
“We are now facing individuals who are responding positively to the messages issued by the Islamic State without having had any special training," the French interior minister said on the same day ISIS claimed responsibility for the Bastille Day rampage.
  • Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was unstable and sometimes violent. His father Monthir Bouhlel, in Tunisia, told RTL he took him to a psychiatrist, and he took his treatments and had a serious illness. Since his son moved to France, he had not seen him for four years.
  • Truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel sent his family in Msaken, Tunisia, all the money he had saved in France just days before he launched his devastating attack in Nice, MailOnline can reveal.
  • President Hollande has met defence and security chiefs and cabinet ministers.The meetings follow criticism from opposition and the media over security after the third major attack in France in 18 months.

  • Lahouaiej-Bouhlel hired the vehicle on Monday, taking the 19-tonne removals truck – the biggest – from a fleet of lorries.