The man who killed 84 Bastille Day revellers in the French city of Nice by driving a truck at a crowd had been radicalised recently and quickly, France’s Prime Minister told a newspaper as a further 18 victims fought for their lives on Sunday.
Thursday night’s attack at peak holiday time on the Riviera plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after jihadi gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.
French health minister Marisol Touraine said the 18, including one child, were in a critical condition, while about 85 people in total were still hospitalised.
The attacks, along with one in Brussels four months ago, have shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.
Authorities have yet to produce evidence the 31year-old driver, Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by the police, had any actual links to ISIS. The Isl-amist militant group claimed the attack thou-gh, and Manuel Valls said there was no doubting the assailant’s motives.
“The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly,” Mr Valls said in an interview with newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.
ISIS, which is under military pressure in its Iraq and Syria strongholds from forces opposed to it, considers France a key target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the US, which is leading a coalition against it.
France is also home to Europe’s biggest Musl-im population, and has been criticised in some quarters for fostering racial, ethnic and religious disharmony.
Mr Valls defended France’s record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years and said the group’s modus operandi of cajoling un-stable people into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible was difficult to combat. “Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts...This is probably what happened in Nice’s case,” Mr Valls said.
With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, French Opposition is increasing pressure and seizing on what they described as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2 km through large crowds before it was finally halted.
