Eight people have been found guilty over their links to the terrorist who drove a heavy truck into Bastille Day crowds in Nice in 2016, killing 86 people and injuring 450 others, reports The Guardian.
Survivors of the attack described how the seafront in the Riviera city resembled a “war zone” after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel zig-zagged down it at high speed, deliberately aiming at those celebrating France’s national day.
A Paris court found the driver’s friends Chokri Chafroud and Mohamed Ghraieb guilty of being part of a criminal terrorist operation and jailed them for 18 years. A third man, Ramzi Arefa, accused of helping Lahouaiej-Bouhlel obtain a weapon, was also found guilty and given a 12-year jail term.
Five others, four men and a woman, who were also on trial over links to the attack were found guilty of being “associated with a criminal with a view to committing a crime”.
An estimated 40,000 people had gathered on 14 July 2016 to watch a firework display when Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, began his deadly four-minute drive down the Nice seafront shortly before 11pm.
He careered down the Promenade des Anglais in a 21-tonne white Renault for more than 2km, deliberately swerving into groups of people to cause the maximum number of deaths and injuries. Among those killed were 15 children, the youngest of whom was two years old.
Police shot dead Lahouaiej-Bouhjlel, a French-Tunisian delivery driver known to police for petty crimes, as he began firing a semi-automatic rifle into the crowds from the truck’s cab.
Two days later, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, which came eight months and one day after a wave of terrorist shootings and bombings in Paris in which 131 people died, including 90 at the Bataclan concert hall – but French anti-terrorism investigators were unable to establish any links between IS and the lorry driver.
During the trial, which opened in September and was overseen by five professional judges in place of a jury, the court heard harrowing evidence from grieving families and survivors of the second-most deadly massacre in peacetime France.