A truck on the Promenade des Anglais
On the evening of 14 July 2016, France’s Bastille Day national holiday, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a nineteen-tonne Renault Midlum cargo truck into crowds gathered on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice at around 10:30 in the evening, as people celebrated with fireworks and public festivities along the seafront. The attack killed 86 people, a toll that rose from an initial 84 as two further victims later died of their injuries, and injured 458 others, including 52 who were classified as critically wounded. Victims came from eighteen different countries, reflecting the international character of the crowd gathered along Nice’s famous coastal promenade for the holiday celebrations that night.
Not on any watchlist
Police shot and killed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel approximately five minutes after he began driving into the crowd, ending the attack relatively quickly once officers were able to reach and stop the vehicle. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a 31-year-old Tunisian national who had lived in Nice since 2005 under a French residency permit, working as a delivery truck driver. He had five prior criminal offences on record, including a January 2016 conviction for attacking a motorist with a wooden pallet that resulted in a suspended sentence, but none of this prior criminal history had led French authorities to flag him as a security or terrorism risk before the attack.
A rapid, largely self-directed radicalisation
Investigators established that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s radicalisation, whatever its ultimate cause, occurred rapidly and close to the time of the attack rather than over a long period. He began attending mosque regularly only in April 2016, some three months before the attack, and by early July had started conducting daily internet searches for Quranic verses and religious recordings. Eight days before the attack, on 6 July, he grew a beard, telling acquaintances that its meaning was religious in nature. French prosecutor François Molins later described this as evidence of a clear and recent interest in radical jihadist ideology, but one that had developed with unusual speed compared with more gradual radicalisation patterns investigators had documented in other cases.
Depression, divorce, and a firing behind the beard
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s personal circumstances in the months before the attack were marked by significant instability. His father reported that he had long suffered from depression, alcohol and drug use, and a documented nervous breakdown between 2002 and 2004, and his sister confirmed he had been seeing psychologists for an extended period. In the immediate run-up to the attack, he was going through a divorce and had recently been fired from his delivery job in January 2016 after falling asleep while driving. This combination of long-standing psychological difficulty and acute recent personal crisis existed alongside, and is not straightforwardly separable from, whatever ideological motivation ultimately drove him toward the attack.
Days of surveillance, then money sent home
Digital evidence recovered from his phone and computer painted a detailed picture of both his ideological interest and his practical preparations. Investigators found Islamic State propaganda, images connected to the Charlie Hebdo attack and Osama bin Laden, and searches for what he termed terrible or horrible mortal accidents, alongside research specifically on the perpetrator of the Orlando nightclub shooting. On 12 and 13 July, he surveyed the Promenade des Anglais multiple times using the rented truck he would later use in the attack, and in the days immediately beforehand he transferred between ninety-seven thousand and one hundred thousand euros to relatives in Tunisia, a substantial sum whose exact purpose investigators did not fully establish.
Claimed by ISIS, but not directed by it
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack through its Amaq News Agency on 16 July, stating that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had acted in response to the group’s calls to target citizens of nations participating in the anti-Islamic State coalition. French investigators, however, concluded a more limited connection: while Lahouaiej-Bouhlel appeared to have acted with the assistance of some accomplices in preparing the attack, prosecutors found no evidence of central direction from the Islamic State’s own organisational structure, and his name had never appeared in France’s database of suspected militants prior to the attack, distinguishing his case from the more centrally coordinated Paris and Brussels attacks carried out by an organised cell in the same period.