Nice Attacker Had Accomplices, Paris Prosecutor Says
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July 21, 2016 2:55 PM
The Paris prosecutor said Thursday that the man who drove a truck through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 84 people, had accomplices and seemed to have been plotting his attack for months.
Francois Molins told reporters in Paris that information from the attacker's phone showed searches and photos suggesting he could have been preparing an attack as far back as 2015.
Molins said five suspects in custody were facing preliminary terrorism charges, including complicity to murder and possessing weapons, for their alleged roles in helping the perpetrator carry out the attack July 14.
He identified the suspects as four men — two Franco-Tunisians, a Tunisian and an Albanian — and one woman of dual French-Albanian nationality. Intelligence services did not know any of them, according to the the French news agency AFP.
The truck driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, was a Tunisian who had been living in Nice for several years.
Earlier in the day, French police conducted a counterterrorism operation in the Argenteuil area north of Paris near a mosque and an Islamic library, authorities said. It wasn't known whether the operation had any links to last week's truck attack in Nice.
No police presence
Meanwhile, France's interior minister said there were no national police stationed at the entrance to the walkway in Nice when the Bastille Day truck attack took place.
Bernard Cazeneuve's acknowledgement Thursday came as a newspaper accused French authorities of a lack of transparency for their handling of the massacre.
Cazeneuve had said, in a speech two days after the July 14 attack, that national police were "very present on the Promenade des Anglais” and suggested that their cars were blocking the pedestrian sidewalk entrance,
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