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Police arrest three in Nice as Islamic
State claims truck attack
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 [July 16, 2016]
By Omar Fahmy and Michel Bernouin
CAIRO/NICE, France (Reuters) - Islamic
State claimed responsibility for the truck attack on the French city of
Nice on Saturday as French police arrested three people there in
connection with the carnage that claimed the lives of at least 84
people.
"The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down
people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State," the news agency Amaq,
which supports Islamic State, said via its Telegram account.
"He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals
of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State," the
statement said.
French authorities said they were checking the claim. The 31-year old
Tunisian driver of the truck drove at a Bastille day crowd on the
waterfront of the French riveria city on Thursday night. Authorities had
been working to find out whether his motives were indeed connected to
radical Islam.
He was not known to French intelligence sources for radicalization.
The arrests, which came on top of two on Friday including the attacker's
wife, concerned the attacker's "close entourage", the sources said. They
were made in two different areas of Nice.
A Reuters reporter saw about 40 elite police raid a small apartment near
the central station, where one individual was arrested.
Thursday night's attack plunged France into new grief and fear just
eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.
The truck zigzagged along the city's seafront Promenade des Anglais as a
fireworks display marking the French national day ended.
It careered into families and friends listening to an orchestra or
strolling above the Mediterranean beach toward the century-old grand
Hotel Negresco.
The attack is the third of its kind in France since the beginning of
2015, and a state of emergency in place since 130 people were killed in
and around Paris last November is to be extended for another three
months.
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A man covered with a towel is apprehended by French police as the
investigation continues two days after an attack by the driver of a
heavy truck who ran into a crowd on Bastille Day killing scores and
injuring as many on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, France, July
16, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
The driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was shot dead by officers at
the scene. He was known to police for petty crimes but was not on a
watch list of suspected militants. He had one criminal conviction
for road rage, having been sentenced to probation three months ago
for throwing a wooden pallet at another driver.
Ahead of the claim by Islamic State, the militant Islamist group
which grabbed control of swathes of Iraq and Syria but which is now
under military pressure from forces opposed to it, French officials
had not disclosed any direct evidence linking Bouhlel with the
jihadism.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, asked on Friday if he
could confirm the attacker's motives were linked to jihadism, said:
"No. ... We have an individual who was not known to intelligence
services."
Relatives and neighbors in Bouhlel's home town of Msaken outside the
coast city of Sousse said he was sporty and had shown no sign of
being radicalized, including when he last returned for the wedding
of a sister four years ago.
(Reporting by Michel Bernouin; Johnny Cotton; Writing by Michel
Rose; Editing by Andrew Callus)
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