Still taken from video made available Wednesday July 20, 2016, showing Nice, France, attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, left, after seeming to injure his opponent while competing in a martial arts competition in 2010. His opponent, who asked not to be named, said he remembers Bouhlel as an novice who repeatedly made mistakes during the fight, saying he would strike with his head and elbows which are banned by the rules. The July 14 2016, Bastille Day truck rampage by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel left at least 84 people dead.PARIS – The truck driver who killed 84 people on a Nice beachfront had accomplices and appears to have been plotting his attack for months, the Paris prosecutor said Thursday.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said five suspects currently in custody are facing preliminary terrorism charges for their alleged roles in helping 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel in the July 14 attack in the southern French city. Molins’ office, which oversees terrorism investigations, opened a judicial inquiry Thursday into a battery of charges for the suspects, including complicity to murder and possessing weapons tied to a terrorist enterprise.
The suspects are four men – two Franco-Tunisians, a Tunisian and an Albanian – and one woman of dual French-Albanian nationality, Molins said. The driver was a Tunisian man who had been living in Nice for several years.
People close to Bouhlel said he had shown no signs of radicalization until very recently. But Molins said information from Bouhlel’s phone showed searches and photos that suggested he could have been preparing an attack as far back as 2015.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though authorities have said they had not found signs that the extremist group directed it.