Nice killer’s motives remain mystery as investigators seek links

“There was nothing in his past that could have foreseen the acts he’s now accused of,” Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said on RTL Radio.

The 31-year-old Tunisian with French residency was killed by police after he drove a rented 19-ton refrigerator truck for about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) down Nice’s seafront Promenade des Anglais, killing those 84 people and seriously wounding more than 50. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Bouhlel was radicalized “very quickly,” without providing more details.

Islamic State’s news agency called the man who carried out the Nice attack one of its “soldiers,” but even the radical group stopped short of claiming it had organized the attack. It said, without using his name, he’d “carried out the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition countries fighting Islamic State.”

Paris anti-terrorism prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters Friday that Bouhlel wasn’t on any list of radicalized individuals and investigators were unaware of any contacts with terror groups. The killings are being treated as terrorism because “this sort of action is the sort of action advocated by terrorist groups on online media,” he said.

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