The white 19-tonne truck jolted and stalled before coming to a halt in front of the Palais de la Méditerranée luxury hotel and casino on the seafront Promenade des Anglais in Nice. The truck’s radiator grill and bonnet were missing and its engine was overheating. The subsequent investigation files record that it had halted at precisely 10.35pm and 45 seconds on that July 14th evening in 2016, shortly after the end of a Bastille Day fireworks display that had attracted a large number of spectators along the seafront promenade.
As screaming crowds of people fled, about ten police officers, their guns at the ready, approached the disfigured vehicle. About 20 metres from them, in the cabin of the truck, they could see the silhouette of a man, standing upright, and pointing a semi-automatic pistol in the direction of the door on the driver’s side. That was where, moments before, the rider of a scooter had jumped onto the truck and, gripping the driver’s door, heroically tried to grapple with the steering wheel to put an end to the carnage. The man inside the truck was now shooting at the scooter rider, then turned his weapon on the police officers as they encircled the vehicle.
The officers jumped to shelter, some behind a palm tree, others behind a concrete electricity meter, from where they returned fire. “I fired at first aiming at the head because it was the only thing that could be seen, given the height of the truck’s cabin,” said one of them later in a statement to the investigation. “I shot through the windscreen. The individual crouched down. I think he laid down on the passenger-side seat because I saw him reappear on that side.”
The man inside the truck pointed his gun and took one more shot before collapsing under a hail of police bullets. “I saw his head fall backwards onto the frame of the window on the passenger side of the truck,” continued the officer. “I don’t know if it was me or a colleague who hit him.”
The senior officer among them called out: “Cease firing, cease firing.”
One of the officers, a voluntary fireman in his spare time, and who as such had been trained in first-aid, walked around the truck and, behind it, discovered the extent of the massacre. In his statement he recalled seeing: “Tens of bodies that were crushed and lying. There were a lot of mutilated bodies, heads smashed, a four-year-old kid with blood running from his mouth and ears. It was carnage, a war scene. We slipped on pools of blood, there were bodies really everywhere.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In the space of four minutes and seventeen seconds, the truck driver had killed 84 people, including 15 children, and injured more than 450 others, as he mowed down crowds along an almost two-kilometre pedestrian zone set up that evening on the Promenade des Anglais. Two more adults would die from their injuries over the following days.
A police officer arrived at the scene of the stationary truck, wearing a protective helmet and carrying an armoured shield, and peered through the cabin window. The body of the driver lay across the passenger seat, his head protruding from the cabin. The officers present would learn the dead man’s identity from reading the press. He was Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian. The puzzle of the so-called “killer of Nice” had begun.
Urinating on his wife, stabbing his daughters’ cuddly toy
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who arrived in France from Tunisia in 2005, was previously unknown to the French anti-terrorist services. His wife, who, at the time of the Bastille Day attack was divorcing him, brushed the portrait of a husband who was not a practicing Muslim. “He eats pork, drinks alcohol […], I have never seen him pray,” she said in a statement to the judicial investigation. His employer described Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a goods delivery driver, as being discrete, someone who showed no sign of practicing a religion and who never had disciplinary problems. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s criminal record was limited to a six-month suspended jail sentence, handed down for having struck another driver with a pallet after a row erupted on a street when he was unloading goods for delivery.
But his violence was above all displayed in his family life. His wife, the mother of his three children, described being beaten, including when she was pregnant, of him raping her, of insults and humiliations, for which she reported him to police on several occasions. “He liked harming,” she said in a statement before the examining magistrate leading the judicial investigation into the Nice massacre. “He liked burning me with straws, he hit me with kicks to the head, because he wanted to see blood flow. He was a monster, the devil even took inspiration from him.”
Two years before the carnage on the Promenade des Anglais, she went to a police station to report how Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had defecated in the living room of the family's apartment and then urinated on her. She said he often threatened their daughters with death, and had stabbed one of their cuddly bear toys.
His pre-existing psycho-pathological [condition] had found in radical Islamist ideology the necessary ‘breeding ground’ to favour carrying out the murderous act.
His wife’s accounts, which were corroborated by several members of the family and friends, as well as the absence of any known links between him and the so-called Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the truck attack in Nice, raise puzzling questions. In the media, there was speculation as to whether the massacre was a terrorism-motivated act or whether it was in fact the mad act of a mentally deranged man. The examining magistrate was also in doubt, and led investigations into Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s psychological condition.
Under questioning, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s father underlined that his son had had mental troubles. After an episode of repeated violence by his son when he was a teenager, he said he took him for a consultation with a psychiatrist in Tunisia. The psychiatrist diagnosed his troubles as being caused by the over-consumption of protein he took for body-building and which made him incapable of controlling himself when he became frustrated. He prescribed a course of antidepressants, tranquillizers and an antipsychotic drug used for treating schizophrenia and bipolar problems.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In Nice, the manager of a gym where Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a paying member, said in a statement that the Tunisian came every day with the clear aim of meeting women, with whom, he said, he was very forward. “He was very heavy […] he appeared perverse,” he said. A staff member of a salsa dance club visited by Lahouaiej-Bouhlel remembered his efforts to pick up women as “pathological”, that he “had no limit” and that he “spoke only of sex”. A sports instructor, who said he received death threats from Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, described the latter’s unwanted behaviour with women, and said he displayed “definite mental instability”.
But to the question of whether the massacre he perpetrated was an isolated act of madness, the examining magistrate decided it was not, as she set out in the case file: “The questions which arose throughout the investigation about the mental health of the perpetrator cannot equally place into question the appreciation of the qualification of his act as being terrorist.”
A radicalisation revealed by his phone and computer files
As Mediapart reported three days after the attack, it would not be the first time among the jihadist ranks that an individual had displayed pathological and violent behaviour. A childhood friend of Amedy Coulibaly, who in the name of the Islamic State (IS) group killed four people in his January 2015 hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket close to Paris, told investigators: “In his moods, he would wind up quickly and come back down quickly, as if he was bi-polar.” A report by the EU police cooperation agency Europol, dated January 18th 2016, noted: “A significant portion of foreign fighters have been diagnosed with mental problems prior to joining IS.” It said these accounted for 20% of them according to one source, and even more according to another.
On February 17th 2016, Patrick Calvar, head of the French domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, was questioned at a hearing by the French Senate’s commission for foreign affairs, defence and the armed forces. During the hearing, Calvar spoke of the presence among jihadist ranks of “de-humanised individuals, reduced to an animal state”, adding that “there is here a psychiatric problem, and a question of protection for society”.
In the case of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the examining magistrate in charge of the judicial investigation into the Nice attack noted that his “pre-existing psycho-pathological [condition] had found in radical Islamist ideology the necessary ‘breeding ground’ to favour carrying out the murderous act”.
Above all, the judicial investigation established that the radicalisation of the Tunisian was both real and was not new. One of his rare close friends gave a statement in which he said that during the winter before the attack, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had shown him a video of the decapitation of IS hostages, boasting that he regularly watched such videos.
One of the eight defendants now on trial for their alleged involvement in preparations for the massacre, told the investigation that, two years before the event, “his [Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s] internet account had been suspended because he too frequently watched videos of executions by Islamists”, and that the Tunisian frequented radicalised individuals in the Nice neighbourhood of Ariane. An uncle of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel detailed how he would have disagreements with his nephew who “supported those who committed terrorist attacks”.
These different statements were lent further strength by evidence found in a search of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s apartment in Nice. Videos of hostage executions were found on his mobile phone. In the laptop computer found in the living room were photos of jihadist leaders from around the world, including Osama bin Laden, Salah Abdeslam, and Boubakeur el-Hakim, a French jihadist and IS 'emir' who planned its terrorist attacks.
A search of his Facebook account revealed his readings of texts by French philosopher Michel Onfray, whose statements that terrorist attacks in France were a logical response to Western policies were, the judicial investigation noted, “abundantly relayed by jihadist propaganda”. The investigation also concluded that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had for many months “fed on” articles, documents, images and videos connected to the terrorist themes of jihadists.
For the Nice attack, he chose an operational method that had for long been that of jihadist terrorists. In 2010, Inspire, the propaganda magazine for the Sunni Muslim terrorist group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, recommended using an all-wheel drive vehicle with which to mow victims down, and advised would-be jihadist killers to take their time in choosing a densely crowded spot to succeed in perpetrating the greatest “carnage”.
Finally, evidence shows Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had premeditated his crime for more than a year. Examination of his computer revealed his online searches on the subject of fatal road accidents, and that he downloaded videos of these. In a mobile phone he was found to be carrying in the truck on the night of July 14th 2016, there was a photo, dated January 1st that year, of an article in the regional daily Nice Matin which ran with the headline: “He voluntarily charged into a restaurant terrace”. Also on that same mobile phone was a video of Egyptian police force trucks driving into a crowd of demonstrators.
All of these elements lifted any remaining doubts the investigators may have had about what motivated Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. The man who, at 9.34pm that Bastille Day evening, arrived by bicycle to pick up the 19-tonne truck parked on the corner of the Boulevard Vérany and the Rue Georges-Chapel, who placed the bike inside the back of it before climbing into the cabin and driving down to commit the massacre on the Promenade des Anglais, was indeed a terrorist.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse
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