| BBC News | - |
Four people believed to be linked to the man who killed 84 people in Nice are in police custody, French prosecutor's office say.
Four men held over lorry attack in Nice
- 33 minutes ago
- From the section Europe
Four people believed to be linked to the man who killed 84 people in Nice are in police custody, French prosecutor's office say.
One man was arrested Friday and three others on Saturday, AFP agency said.Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a lorry through crowds marking Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais on Thursday before he was shot dead by police.
So-called Islamic State claims the lorry attack was carried out by one of its followers.
A news agency linked to the group, Amaq Agency, said: "He did the attack in response to calls to target the citizens of the coalition that is fighting the Islamic State."
French President Francois Hollande will chair crisis talks later.
Mr Hollande, who says the attack was a terrorist act, has already extended a state of emergency by three months.
- What we know about the attack
- Is freedom under threat in France?Four men held over lorry attack in Nice
- The jihadists of the French Riviera
- Four years of attacks in France
- 'Heartbreaking' image of victim
- Bastille Day attack in pictures
- Tears and sympathy for the victims
- Who was the attacker?
Prosecutors said Tunisian Lahouaiej-Bouhlel droven the lorry 2km (1.2 miles) along the promenade targeting people.
Ten of the dead were children. Some 202 people were injured; 52 are critical, of whom 25 are on life support.
A state of emergency has been in place across France since November's Paris attacks carried out by militants from the so-called Islamic State (IS) group, in which 130 people died. It had been due to end on 26 July.
Some 30,000 people were on the Promenade des Anglais at the time of the attack, officials said.
Residents of Nice and foreign tourists were killed, among them four French citizens, three Algerians, a teacher and two schoolchildren from Germany, three Tunisians, two Swiss, two Americans, a Ukrainian, an Armenian and a Russian.
He warned that the battle against terrorism would be long, as France faced an enemy "that will continue to attack those people and those countries that count liberty as an essential value".
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the attack bore the hallmarks of jihadist terrorism.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was known to the police as a petty criminal, but was "totally unknown to intelligence services... and was never flagged for signs of radicalisation," the prosecutor added.
No comments:
Post a Comment