Image copyright AP Image caption Police found papers, a mobile phone and credit card inside the lorry, according to reports Police are yet to confirm the identity of the man behind the wheel of the white lorry that ploughed into hundreds of people celebrating Bastille Day on the seafront in Nice.
However, he was named locally as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old man living in Nice, known to police but not previously linked to jihadist groups. He was married with three children and worked as a delivery driver, although he no longer lived with his partner, reports say. Police raided his home on Friday morning, in the Abattoirs area not far from Nice railway station. As emergency services tended to the men, women and children left dying and wounded on the Promenade des Anglais, police scoured the lorry for evidence and found papers that identified him as a Franco-Tunisian or of Tunisian origin. One report said his driver's licence, credit card and mobile phone were found inside the lorry. He had been in trouble with the police in the past for petty crime and violence, but he was not on the watch list of radicalised young men. Anyone seen as a threat to state security has what the government refers to as a "fiche S". The majority of attacks carried out in France since January 2015 have been staged by men designated with a "fiche S", and also linked to so-called Islamic State (IS). Although witnesses initially thought the killer had lost control of the lorry, it soon became clear he was acting deliberately. "I even had time to see the driver's face. He had a beard and appeared to be having fun," one man said. Image copyright Twitter Image caption According to iTele news, police were searching the lorry driver's home in Nice There were suggestions that among the papers found in the vehicle were rental documents. According to one report, the killer hired the lorry from a rental firm in Saint-Laurent-du-Var, a town to the west of Nice, two days beforehand. In 2012, he was barred from entering the home he shared with his partner in the north of the city because of allegations of domestic violence, Nice-Matin reports (in French). Image copyright AFP Image caption The flat where the suspected attacker lived was searched by police in Nice on Friday Outside the flat in the Route de Turin where he had been living, residents of the four-storey building described the man as a loner who never responded when they said hello. He would often be seen climbing the stairs to his first-floor flat, carrying his bike, they said. Although the attacker had a pistol, all the other weapons found in the lorry turned out to be fake, which raises questions about the extent of support he had from jihadist groups. Who was police attacker Larossi Aballa? Many are linking the attack to a 2014 audio message from an IS spokesman, Mohammed al-Adnani, who urged followers to stage all manner of attacks. "If you can't detonate a bomb or fire a shot, manage by yourself... run them over with your car," he said. Many of France's jihadist killers, starting with Mohammed Merah in Toulouse in 2012, began their journey towards militant Islam as petty criminals. The Nice attacker appears to have followed the same path.
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