On a Monday this past summer, a man phoned a rental agency on the outskirts of Nice, on France’s shimmering Mediterranean coast, to inquire, in what the receptionist would later recall as hesitant French, about a large cargo truck. He would be moving to Montpellier in a week, on July 11, the man said. No trucks were available for that date. Perhaps his move could wait, the man replied, and he signed off without any apparent frustration. For a short time, then, calamity was deferred, though hardly anyone could have known this.
Some in Nice knew the man as one of the many playboy predators the city seems to beget—black hair slicked back off a shining brow, dress shoes tapering to varnished points, a dark shirt unbuttoned low to reveal the pectorals into which he had obsessively, unblushingly, invested himself. He was 31 but preferred older women, both for their erotic openness and, it seems clear, for their money. Those who knew him best knew him to be a cold and brutal man, detached, amused by little save rough sex and gore.
He lived inconspicuously enough, however, working as a deliveryman, driving a 13-ton truck. In late June, though, he had taken several weeks off, and now seemed to those he encountered to be restless and bored, or perhaps under the sway of some deepening madness, as several witnesses have testified. Had he been another man, he might have chosen to spend his vacation with his three young children, but they had never stirred in him any great tenderness, and to see them would have meant arranging things with his estranged wife. Rather, as usual, he pedaled his blue bicycle around the city, shot selfies, and phoned loose acquaintances, harassing them with calls and text messages. The man called his sister’s husband, whom he saw perhaps once a year. “I thought he wanted to hurt me, because I’m in serious conflict with his sister,” the brother-in-law told police. He agreed to meet the man but brought a screwdriver for protection. “He talked to me about his life,” the brother-in-law said, “about his work as a deliveryman, about women, about his big sex drive, about his need to seduce and sleep with women, about his father, whom he hates.” The screwdriver wasn’t necessary.
For much of his vacation, the man passed the time browsing the Internet. “Terrible deadly accident,” “horrible deadly accident,” “shocking video not for the faint of heart,” he typed. For months, he had been watching beheadings; he kept an image folder filled with corpses and viscera. The particulars—the identities of the dead, the motives of the killers—were not of any evident interest; any butchery would do. And yet much of the violence he watched was political violence. Perhaps this was inevitable. Never before has so much recorded sadism been so widely available. For this, the world has the Islamic State to thank. A man transfixed by blood would hardly have to subscribe to the jihadist group’s ideology to enjoy its work; it is undoubtedly the best on offer.
In the final two weeks of his life, however, and perhaps for the first time, the man appeared to develop an interest in Islam, the religion into which he had been born. He played recitations of the Koran in his car; he criticized a friend for listening to music; he began to grow a beard. Online, he researched the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a killing carried out in the name of the Islamic State.
Also in evidence on the man’s computer was his apparent fascination with the crowds drawn each summer to the Promenade des Anglais, on Nice’s tranquil coastline, where on July 14 the city’s Bastille Day fireworks can be watched unobstructed, reflected in the black mirror of the sea.
On Tuesday, July 5, the man called the rental agency once again. By chance, the receptionist said, there had been a cancellation; a white Renault Premium, with a total hauling capacity of 21 tons, had become available. The man seemed to be thrilled, and in the afternoon visited the agency with his driver’s license and a deposit check for 1,600 euros. He introduced himself as Mr. Lahouaiej; the license identified him as Mohamed Salmène Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian living in Nice. “He was very relaxed, very calm, and very attentive,” the receptionist said in a deposition, one of hundreds of documents included in the case file compiled by French counterterror investigators, which has not been released to the public. Lahouaiej Bouhlel returned six days later, on the morning of July 11, to pick up the truck. When he got back to Nice, he guided the white truck along the gentle curve of the Promenade des Anglais, a busy road and broad reddish walkway that runs along the Mediterranean, which glowed baby blue at that early hour of the day. He drove along the Promenade at least ten times more in the coming 72 hours.
Since 1880, France has held a national celebration on July 14, the day on which, in 1789, several hundred Frenchmen stormed the Bastille Saint-Antoine, a royal fortress and prison in eastern Paris, in what was effectively the first pitched battle of the French Revolution. (Only Anglophones call the holiday Bastille Day; the French simply call it the 14th of July.) The festivities often include military parades, and Lahouaiej Bouhlel photographed himself that day on the Promenade in front of military jeeps and a tank. At lunchtime he visited his aunt and uncle, who fed him melon and a summer salad of cooked peppers and tomatoes. Their relations were cordial, but his relatives found Lahouaiej Bouhlel to be bizarre and inscrutable. Lately, to his uncle’s confusion, he had been speaking favorably about the jihadists in Syria. “I didn’t understand his convictions,” the uncle said in a deposition that was also included in the confidential case file, “because he absolutely wasn’t religious. He didn’t even do Ramadan.” His aunt attempted to give him a watermelon to take with him. “Tomorrow,” he said. He told her he would be going to watch the fireworks that night.
At 9:34, Lahouaiej Bouhlel pedaled his bike to the white truck, which he had parked near his apartment. He put the bike inside and drove down toward the water, where the fireworks were to begin at ten. Tourists and locals alike, an estimated 30,000 in all, had crowded the beaches and the Promenade. The show ended at 10:20 or so; the streetlights lit up again, casting wan shadows on the sidewalk and the beach. It was a pleasant night, with a warm breeze and bouts of light rain, welcome after weeks of terrible heat. The crowds lingered.
At 10:32, Lahouaiej Bouhlel pulled onto the Promenade’s wide southern thoroughfare. He rode along with the traffic for 1,000 feet or so until, across from the children’s hospital that would soon receive the crushed and mutilated, he drove up onto the broad sidewalk, filled now with revelers and families. He had extinguished his headlights. Soon came the crack of exploding seaside benches, and the dull thud of bodies spinning off the front edges of the truck. Its driver grinned.
Ali Charrihi spent the evening of July 14 on the Promenade with his parents, his wife and three young children, and his cousin Saïd. They watched the fireworks from the sidewalk above the Torrent de Magnan, an underground stream that flows down from the hills into the sea, and in which Ali, now 37, had sometimes played as a child. He and his mother, Fatima, had come together to Nice in 1984, from an isolated Berber village in the mountains of inland Morocco; his father, a factory worker and laborer, had moved to France 11 years earlier. Fatima, who arrived speaking only Berber and had never mastered much French, cleaned houses. She was a cherubic woman, with small, smiling eyes and round cheeks made to seem all the fuller by the hijab that ringed her face. She doted on her children, but also insisted on study and hard work, and could be severe. Her word was law, and that night she decided that the family would remain on the Promenade after the fireworks, to walk together.
Ali had double-parked his car, and his father was parked in a bus lane; Fatima sent them both away to re-park, and they hurried off with Ali’s two sons. That left four of them on the Promenade: Fatima, Saïd, and Ali’s wife, who was pushing her young daughter in a stroller. The girl asked to be picked up, and Saïd took her in his arms. Ali’s father drove past; Saïd pointed to the car, and the group watched it go by.
There was a loud crack, and Saïd turned to see the bench a few yards beyond them explode into splinters. “Truck!” he shouted. With the young girl in his arms, he leapt from the sidewalk down to the rocky beach below. The right edge of the truck passed inches from Ali’s wife’s face, and tore the empty stroller from her hands. Where Fatima had been, there was nothing.
The sidewalk was about ten yards wide, and revelers were fairly sparse on this stretch of the Promenade. Lahouaiej Bouhlel cut the wheel to aim at his victims, who, even when they were walking toward him, often failed to see him coming in the shadowy light. In his wake, the crowd began to scream and run, adults shoving children out of the way, children losing sight of their parents, panic driving the unharmed up and away from the Promenade and into the city.
The first police officer to see the white truck was a man named Christophe, an imposing military veteran with a clean-shaven head and a heavy gold ring. He called it in at 10:33, confusion and urgency in his voice: “We’ve got a truck that’s completely crazy, that’s driving on the street, that just ran people over!” He and two colleagues gave chase in their car, following the truck on the sidewalk, but in avoiding the bodies Lahouaiej Bouhlel left behind, they could not keep pace. They watched helplessly through the windshield.
Lahouaiej Bouhlel accelerated to perhaps 35 miles per hour. The crowds were denser in this section. At about one and a half kilometers, at 10:34, he struck Amie, a bubbly 12-year-old from Nice, out with another family for the festivities. At the children’s hospital, she told her parents that some kindly person had washed her face with towels from a beach club. She died within the hour. Amie’s father, cooking in the following months for himself, his wife, and his remaining daughter, found himself preparing four portions of every dish, though he used ingredients for only three.
The white truck accelerated to perhaps 55 miles per hour. It flew past a police barricade in the roadway; behind the metal barriers, the streets were open to pedestrians, and Lahouaiej Bouhlel turned left over the curb and off the sidewalk, into the crowd. Jean-Pierre Joussemet, a 78-year-old retiree, a small man with thin white hair and glasses, was pushing his 80-year-old wife in a wheelchair. They had retired to Nice, where Jean-Pierre was born, and lived in an apartment just off the Promenade des Anglais. She was in the advanced stages of multiple sclerosis, and he cared for her, lifting her in and out of bed, taking her out most days to walk the Promenade. They had gone out early enough to be sure that she would be in the first row of spectators, with nothing to obstruct her view of the fireworks. Their daughter found her sometime later, frightened and confused, at the Gelateria Pinocchio; her wheelchair was in the street, and Jean-Pierre was nowhere to be found.
In addition to the din of the partygoers, there were loud concerts on the sidewalk, and the white truck thus seemed to arrive smooth and silent. For two kilometers, it drove no stampede, no rush to escape; the truck was rolling forward far more quickly than the wave of panic it set off.
President François Hollande was told of the attack at about 11 P.M., as he dined in the southern city of Avignon. He returned to Paris and the presidential palace, where, shortly before 4 A.M., he gave a televised address. “Horror has once again befallen France,” he said. At the time, 77 had already been declared dead. The identity of the driver of the white truck had not yet been “verified” but his motives were self-evident, Hollande said. “France has been struck on the day of its national celebration, July 14, a symbol of liberty, because human rights are denied by the fanatics, and because France is necessarily their target.” He mentioned the November 2015 jihadist attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed. “Now Nice is the one to be hit,” he said. “The whole of France is under threat from Islamist terrorism.”
By the early evening of July 15, investigators had confirmed Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s identity, but this did not immediately suggest that he was, as the president had wagered, a jihadist. He had been convicted on assault charges earlier in the year, announced François Molins, the country’s top prosecutor, and had received a suspended six-month prison sentence; on a busy street in January, while on the job, he had attacked a man with a piece of wood torn from a shipping pallet after the man had complained that his delivery truck was blocking traffic. “He is, on the other hand, utterly unknown to the intelligence services, and this both nationally and locally,” Molins said, “and had never been the subject of the slightest intelligence file or of the slightest report for radicalization.” Unlike those responsible for the Paris attacks, Lahouaiej Bouhlel seemed to have produced no jihadist propaganda or pledge of allegiance to a terrorist group.
The next morning, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Amaq, one of the group’s propaganda agencies, said that the killer had answered the “calls for targeting the nationals of countries in the coalition that is fighting the Islamic State.” At a press conference, however, Molins described Lahouaiej Bouhlel as “an individual at a great remove from religious considerations, who did not practice the Muslim religion, who ate pork, drank alcohol, consumed drugs, and had an unbridled sex life.”
Still, he noted that the killer had begun to grow a beard and that he had shown “a recent interest in the radical jihadist movement.” Molins referenced the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility and noted that the attack in Nice looked very much like the sort of attack the group had encouraged. But he cautioned that “no element of the investigation at this time shows an allegiance by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel to the terrorist organization, nor ties to individuals presenting themselves as members of that organization.” In a report composed a few days later, a counterterror investigator remarked that this seemed to be an anomaly, the first time the Islamic State had claimed as “one of its soldiers” a killer who had not made a formal statement of allegiance. “Given the scope of the event,” the investigator wrote, the Islamic State “may have seen an opportunity to be seized, so as to gain publicity.”
The crowds grew denser still, and Lahouaiej Bouhlel slowed considerably as he reached the Hôtel Negresco, a pink-domed Belle Époque palace. The rental-agency receptionist, who lived nearby, watched the white truck pass in front of the hotel. “He was slaloming, to hit everything he saw,” she told investigators.
It was 10:35. The police had been alerted that a truck was driving down the Promenade, but it was still unclear to those officers who had not seen the killing for themselves that this was an intentional attack. Three officers, standing beside the thick palms in the center of the road, watched as Lahouaiej Bouhlel approached, swerving sharply. One of the officers later said he assumed the driver was drunk. He trained his gun on the truck as his colleagues yelled, “You, stop!” Lahouaiej Bouhlel looked down on them silently from behind the driver’s-side window and slowed as if to speak. The window shattered suddenly, as Lahouaiej Bouhlel fired three shots and pulled away. The officers chased the white truck on foot.
It did not go far, only an additional 150 yards or so. The truck was limping now, its hood and bumper gone, a front tire squealing as it went flat, the remains of several bodies twisted around the rear axle and caught in a wheel well. It came to a halt across from the Palais de la Méditerranée, a massive hotel and casino, its Art Deco facade uplit grandly in the night. For a time, nothing happened. The truck sat idling in the deserted street; the police giving chase half expected to see it explode. A man, a civilian, climbed up to the driver’s-side door and tried to throw punches through the window. Lahouaiej Bouhlel pulled his gun on the man, who lost his balance and fell to the ground. Lahouaiej Bouhlel fired at him but missed. The police shot back, and pockmarks appeared across the windshield. The killer ducked and shifted to the passenger side of the cabin. An officer approached the truck on this side, raised her pistol above her head, and fired eight rounds into the open window. The shooting stopped; the motor was still running; it was 10:36. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had been shot 16 times.
Christophe, the municipal police officer who had been the first to see the white truck, arrived just as the shooting stopped. Among the limbs and bodies in the wheel well was a woman whose head had come to rest against the ground. She stared up at the officers beside the truck and moved her head silently. Three men disentangled her from the corpses and carried her into the Palais de la Méditerranée on a metal crowd barrier, turned on its side like a stretcher. She did not speak. The street was slippery with blood and brain tissue and scattered with telephones, wallets, keys—the small belongings ejected from the hands and pockets of the stricken as they flew through the air. White bedsheets were brought out from the Palais de la Méditerranée and draped over the bodies. They were French, Italian, Algerian, Kazakh, 20 nationalities in all, ages 2 to 92.
An elderly man wandered into the perimeter the police had set up around the truck, and when the officers saw him, he spoke. “I’m not a threat,” he said. “I want to stay with my wife.” He lay down on the pavement beside a white shroud.
A woman came to speak with the police. “But I don’t understand,” she said. “I was walking, I wanted to see the ocean, I went away to see it. Then I heard a sound, and now I can’t find my husband and my child.” The bodies, the blood, the white truck riddled with bullet holes, had not yet coalesced in her mind as a narrative, as a set of effects and their cause. In her shock, it was as if she could not see them.
Two kilometers back down the long curve of the Promenade, Ali Charrihi knelt at his mother’s side. Fatima’s eyes were closed, her lips pursed in a slight smile. She bled from a gash running from her palm down her wrist; blood pooled behind her head. A young nurse performed CPR. Ali’s father arrived and took his wife’s foot in his hand. “But Ali, she’s cold!” he said. The paramedics jolted her three times with a defibrillator before one of them pointed to Fatima’s ear and the blood trickling from it. “I’m sincerely sorry,” the man said. Ali’s father fainted. His wife, it is believed, was the first to die.
In a local hospital, some days later, members of Jean-Pierre Joussemet’s family were taken to see a patient who could not be identified. The man had been brought naked to the hospital, his clothes likely cut off by paramedics, and he was in a coma. Someone had shaved his head, and the left side of his body, from his forehead down, was a continuous bruise, grotesquely swollen. They were initially incapable of saying if the man was Jean-Pierre, but he was. He died in August, the 86th and final victim.
Late on the night of July 14 and into the following day, Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s aunt received worried phone calls from various relatives in Tunisia, making sure she and her family were safe. No one asked after her nephew Mohamed. “He’s not liked very much in the family,” the aunt would tell investigators.
Lahouaiej Bouhlel was raised in Msaken, Tunisia, one of ten siblings. He was a volatile and unruly boy, hitting other children, breaking doors at home. He obsessed over his appearance, and began lifting weights as an adolescent. “ ‘I am ugly,’ ” he told a psychiatrist at 19, in 2004, according to a report in The New York Times. “I’ve got to build myself up.” The doctor prescribed an antidepressant, an anxiolytic, and Haldol, an antipsychotic often prescribed to treat schizophrenia and aggression. “There were the beginnings of a psychosis,” the psychiatrist told the Times. “He wasn’t someone who was living in the real world.” He was a good student, however, and would have liked to go abroad to university; his father, a livestock trader and property owner who was reputed to be prosperous but miserly, refused to send him.
Marriage was his path out. Hajer Khalfallah had been born in Msaken but was raised in Nice and held French citizenship; she was his first cousin. They married in 2006, when she was 22 and he was 21. “Our marriage was happy at the start,” Khalfallah told police. They moved to a housing project built into a green hillside in the northern part of Nice. She called him Momo. Lahouaiej Bouhlel continued to lift weights, and he asked his wife to take pictures of his body, to track his “progress.” “It was always him first,” she said. “He paid a lot of attention to himself.”
In 2010, he went to work for a beverage-distribution company as a delivery driver. After about six months, clients began to complain about his behavior. “He tended to strut around, to show off,” one of his managers said. The day after a company party, in late 2011, there were complaints that Lahouaiej Bouhlel had made inappropriate advances to several waitresses and waiters. He “denied everything and said he wasn’t homosexual,” the manager said. Lahouaiej Bouhlel was fired; he had to be escorted off the premises by police.
His marriage began to deteriorate. He complained about his wife’s cooking and cleaning, and found she spent too much time with her mother. Her interest in sex was not suitably strong, in his estimation. He began to hit her. On several occasions, she called her husband’s friend Roger and asked him to intervene. Roger, a gay man in his 70s with an attraction to Lahouaiej Bouhlel that he took no pains to disguise, would scold his friend, who would inevitably respond, “You’re right.” “I was like the dad,” Roger said later. “I always tried to get them to reconcile.”
Once, when Khalfallah went out despite Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s opposition, he eviscerated one of his children’s stuffed animals with a knife, she recalled in a deposition. On another occasion, he defecated in their beds and smeared his feces on the walls. “He wanted to push me to divorce him so that he could go live a bachelor’s life, go out with girls, go clubbing,” she said. He humiliated her, she told investigators, urinating on her feet and pouring wine on her face as she slept. (She was a practicing Muslim, who wore a hijab and forswore alcohol, though she was not particularly devout; when asked by police to recite the five pillars of Islam, she could recall only four.) “It’s true that he had no feelings for her—he told me that a lot,” Roger told police. “She knew he didn’t love her.”
Roger and Lahouaiej Bouhlel had met at a gym in Nice. Roger found him to be “charming” and “exceptionally kind”: “He’s a boy who’s nice when he speaks, who’s poised, who’s distinguished.” Roger, too, called him Momo; he called Roger “dear friend.” They bonded over a shared distaste for Maghrébins, or North African Arabs. Lahouaiej Bouhlel told him he agreed that his fellow Arabs were “trouble.” “He loved France, he loved the French, and he hated the Arabs,” Roger told investigators.
Eventually, Lahouaiej Bouhlel and his wife separated and began divorce proceedings. He moved to a small apartment in the east of the city. Roger bought him a bed frame and two couches, gave him a computer and his old Citroën, and offered him 2,000 euros to help pay for his truckdriver’s license. Many of Roger’s friends, like many of those who knew Lahouaiej Bouhlel, assumed the two men were lovers. “I would have loved that,” Roger said. “He was so handsome. I made some overtures to him, but I very quickly understood that I wasn’t of interest to him. He wasn’t interested in men. He liked women too much.”
In 2012, Lahouaiej Bouhlel began taking lessons in salsa and bachata, as often as four nights a week. He was said to have slept with several of his female classmates. “Mohamed was a womanizer, a sexual obsessive,” one former classmate told police. “It’s all he talked about—that was his principal characteristic.” Despite his aggressiveness, he remained within the bounds of tolerable male behavior, at least as defined locally. “I saw him as someone who was troubled, fragile, and unstable, but not at all dangerous,” one woman told police. “He tried to be a playboy. He was really trying to make people like him. I think he was in need of recognition. He had a lack of self-confidence.”
In January 2015, jihadists murdered much of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper based in Paris, for publishing various caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Roger received a message from his friend Momo: Je suis Charlie, the slogan of support for the victims that quickly spread across France. Roger was pleased, but he also believed Lahouaiej Bouhlel hadn’t the faintest idea what Charlie Hebdo had done to so anger the jihadists. “That was all over his head,” he told investigators. He and Lahouaiej Bouhlel occasionally discussed the war in Syria and the Europeans who went there to fight, he said, but always at Roger’s initiative. “I would say to him, ‘Do you realize? There are people who are going to fight in Syria.’ ” Lahouaiej Bouhlel would reply, “Who cares? They’re just going to die there, in any case.”
Lahouaiej Bouhlel had seemed sad before the attack, Roger said, perhaps depressed. He allowed for the possibility that his friend had indeed been indoctrinated, but this would have had to have occurred “only at the very end,” he said, and invisibly. Roger mentioned Andreas Lubitz, the pilot who in 2015 killed himself and 149 other people when he deliberately crashed Germanwings Flight 9525 into the mountains north of Nice. “Momo did the same thing,” he suggested. “He wanted, in death, for people to talk about him.”
In addition to Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s lifeless body and a 7.65-mm pistol, the police found two plastic imitation M16 assault rifles, a plastic imitation Beretta handgun, and a plastic mock grenade in the cabin of the white truck. What he intended to do with these props is hardly clear, but they suggest the possibility of an attack that was meant to proceed differently. Or perhaps they are simply further evidence of a mind driven not by logic but by some more primitive instinct.
Also with Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s body was a phone, which displayed a text message he’d sent moments before steering his way onto the Promenade. “Salam Ramzy,” it began. “I wanted to tell you that the pistol that you gave me yesterday is great, so let’s have five more from where your buddy lives, 7 Rue Miollis on the fifth floor. It’s for Chokri and his friends.” Oddly—and much of what police would soon discover was highly unusual by the standards of terror investigations, if not outright bizarre—Lahouaiej Bouhlel had several hours earlier made a voice recording on his phone that contained almost identical language, as if he had planned his final message in advance. Yet the recording differed from the text message in several respects. It placed the gun purchase not “yesterday” but on “the day before yesterday”: Police say this was the actual day on which Lahouaiej Bouhlel had gone to an apartment at 7 Rue Miollis and, with the assistance of Ramzi Arefa, his cocaine dealer, purchased a gun. The recording also noted ominously that “Chokri and his friends” were “ready for next month,” and that they were “now at Walid’s.”
On July 15, on the advice of his lawyer, Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s friend Mohamed Oualid Ghraieb contacted the police, offering his assistance and hoping to make clear his horror at what his friend had done. Officers visited him at his home, and the next morning Ghraieb arrived at the headquarters of the judicial police in Nice to give a deposition. In the intervening hours, police had learned that he was widely known as Walid.
He was originally from Tunisia, he said, and for the past seven years had worked as a receptionist at a small hotel in central Nice. He and Lahouaiej Bouhlel had met more than a decade earlier, at a gym in Tunisia, and had seen each other again by chance in 2009, at a gym in Nice. The police asked various questions about Islam, and Ghraieb explained that he considered himself to be a Muslim but that he did not practice. He was asked about the religious practices of his friends in Nice. “I don’t have any friends here,” Ghraieb said. “My life is with my wife and my stepdaughter, my dogs. I avoid spending time with people who could bring me problems. I don’t spend time with Maghrébins, because I don’t like them.”
The police told Ghraieb he was being placed under arrest. “I wanted to show my good faith by coming to see you to offer my help,” he protested. “I had the misfortune to make the acquaintance of this man. He’s not even a friend—we had almost no contact.” Ghraieb called Lahouaiej Bouhlel “a coward, a thug, a murderer,” and a “bastard,” and added that he condemned his “abominable act.”
Either Ghraieb’s memory failed him repeatedly over the following days, and at suspiciously convenient moments, or he chose to lie to his questioners. He insisted that he and Lahouaiej Bouhlel were not close. “Sometimes we wouldn’t call one another for six months or a year,” he said. When he was told that their telephones had been in contact 1,278 times over the preceding 12 months, he conceded that they would exchange “dumb messages” and calls, “but there was nothing special in these calls. I have nothing to hide.” Ghraieb also admitted that he’d ridden in the white truck after Lahouaiej Bouhlel had picked it up at the rental agency, but said he had gotten scared when his friend began driving erratically. “I told him I wanted to get out, and he finally stopped. But he made fun of me, and told me, ‘You’re afraid of dying!’ and laughed.”
In the days preceding the attack, Lahouaiej Bouhlel had sent cryptic text messages to various friends and acquaintances, including Ghraieb. On July 5, Lahouaiej Bouhlel reserved a small moving truck from a rental agency called ADA; that morning, he sent Ghraieb a message that read, “Towards ADA.” (He canceled the ADA rental the same day, presumably after he learned that the other truck was available.) Ghraieb claimed to investigators that he hadn’t received the message. Two days later, Lahouaiej Bouhlel appears to have sent Ghraieb two more text messages, reading “14.7.7.16” and “15.8.” The first was apparently a garbled reference to July 14; the second seemed to refer to August 15, the date of another major public party on the Promenade.
The police also questioned Ghraieb about two text messages sent from his phone to Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s about a year and a half earlier, on January 10, 2015. Charlie Hebdo had been attacked three days before. Ghraieb wrote: “I’m not Charlie. Let them go get fucked in the ass, and may God do even worse to them.” The second message read: “Oh yes comrade, these people who insult our dear prophet are devils, and see how God sent soldiers of Allah to finish them off like pieces of s!!” Ghraieb began by claiming that the translation of the messages—they had been written partially in Arabic—was wildly inaccurate. He then insisted that the messages had been “a joke,” or perhaps that someone else had written them, or that he had written them while drunk. He said he condemned all jihadist violence.
Investigators concluded that the “Chokri” mentioned in Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s final message was likely Chokri Chafroud. Like Ghraieb, Chafroud had received a message from Lahouaiej Bouhlel mentioning “ADA.” There were numerous other strange messages. On the morning of July 13, Lahouaiej Bouhlel wrote, “I found you housing with a guy,” and later that day, “All set.” On July 14, two hours before the killings, he wrote, “I’m on the Prom, come, I’ll give you...It’s for...159.” After his arrest, Chafroud told police he hadn’t understood the messages and did not respond. Initially, he claimed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was simply an “acquaintance,” but when confronted with evidence suggesting a more significant relationship—among other things, a picture of Chafroud was the background image on Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s phone—he admitted that he had lied. “I saw him more than what I told you,” he said. “But I didn’t know anything about his plans.”
In April, Chafroud had sent Lahouaiej Bouhlel a Facebook message that seemed to prefigure the attack. “Load the truck,” it read. “Put 2,000 tonnes of iron in it, and go fuck, cut the brakes my friend, and I watch.” Chafroud immediately admitted to having written the message but could provide no credible explanation as to why. “I can’t deny having said this,” he said, “but I didn’t want him to kill anyone, and I didn’t think he’d do what he did.” He claimed to have written the message while watching Spider-Man, and that the movie had inspired him to write something violent.
At a nationally televised press conference on July 21, Molins, the prosecutor, announced the indictment of Ghraieb, Chafroud, Ramzi Arefa, and two Albanians who had allegedly provided the gun used by Lahouaiej Bouhlel; terror charges were brought against all five. Molins spent much of the event detailing the contents of Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s telephone, and noted in particular a photograph he had taken at 5:09 P.M. on July 14, five and a half hours before the attack. The photograph showed a sheet of paper listing ten handwritten telephone numbers, three of them grouped with the name “Ramzi,” Molins announced, and five with the name “Chokri.” The paper sketched the structure of an apparent criminal conspiracy; several similar sheets of paper were found at Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s apartment, bearing further groups of names, numbers, and addresses.
It seemed the miraculous good fortune of the police that all of this evidence had fallen into their hands. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had made little effort to protect his alleged co-conspirators; on the contrary, he effectively delivered them to the authorities. In a single voice recording on his phone, he had seemingly announced to investigators the names of his accomplices, the existence of their plans for the coming month, and, perhaps most improbably, a precise address for the traffickers from whom he had purchased his gun.
After several hours in police custody, the men began to wonder aloud if Lahouaiej Bouhlel had sought to frame them. “From the outset, I’ve been saying I’m a victim here,” Ghraieb said. “Maybe he tried to set a trap for me.” Arefa cried and banged his head against the police station wall. Chafroud told his questioners, “I think something was wrong with [Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s] head and he inserted me into all of this, and I don’t know why.” In the days before the attack, Lahouaiej Bouhlel had taken several photographs of another man, Hamdi Zagar, in front of the white truck. “I didn’t understand why he wanted to take pictures of me,” Zagar told investigators. “Afterwards, I understood that he wanted to frame me. He wanted me to end up in front of you after what he did.” Zagar was charged several days after the others.
To suggest that the attack in Nice may have been born of an impulse more ambiguous than fanatical belief is not to diminish the threat that jihadism poses to France. Scores of French extremists have traveled to Syria and Iraq; scores more remain at home, with the exhortation to strike whenever and however they can. The government has declared a state of emergency, which allows police and intelligence services to perform warrantless searches and to unilaterally order the house arrest of anyone they deem threatening. And yet the attacks have continued. French security officials say they are simply overwhelmed by the scale of the threat, the sheer number of men and women now assessed as potential killers.
Only days after the Nice attack, in a small town in Normandy, two 19-year-olds burst into a church during morning Mass, slit the throat of the 85-year-old priest, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they left. Both were known to the authorities for having attempted to travel to Syria, and one of the two was in fact already under house arrest. The following day, the Islamic State released a video the young men had recorded before their attack, in which they pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the caliphate.
The authorities might reasonably have expected to discover that Lahouaiej Bouhlel had recorded a similar video. Instead, the most notable documents he left behind were those that methodically implicated various friends and acquaintances as his co-conspirators. “There is nothing, at this stage of the investigation, that shows a link to Syria,” a spokeswoman for François Molins said in an interview. As of November, she said, investigators had yet to develop a “definitive theory” of the crime.
Yet from the beginning, French politicians have fashioned their assumptions about Lahouaiej Bouhlel into pronouncements of fact. “They’re at war with us, and we’re at war with the terrorists,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared on July 15. A few days later, the state of emergency was extended into 2017.
Valls, who in December announced his intention to run in this spring’s presidential election, sought to inscribe the attack in a narrative of righteous struggle. “Why are they attacking France?” he asked. “Because it’s the country of human rights, of liberté, of égalité, of fraternité.” France is, he went on, “a country that matters in the world.” This last bit seemed to be the point. Perversely, the Islamic State’s hatred of France can appear, from a certain angle, an affirmation of the country’s grandeur.
Perhaps the government’s bombast consoled the populace; at the very least, it surely flattered the human desire for purpose, suggesting that the 86 dead were not the victims of a crime without discernible meaning but, rather, martyrs in a struggle for good. Yet there is danger in this rhetoric, too. To endorse the notion of civilizational clash is to accept the premise upon which the Islamic State is fighting, legitimating the absurd claim that the group poses an existential threat to France and the West. France’s bluster is, in this sense, a victory for the Islamic State.
In the meantime, it is quite probable that the most constructive counterterror policy to come out of Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s attack had nothing at all to do with France’s international stature, or with jihadism, or even with the police and the intelligence services. In time for the July 14 festivities this summer, the city of Nice will have completed the installation of a guardrail along the length of the Promenade and bollards across the sidewalk, unobtrusive but sturdy enough to stop a truck.
Scott Sayare *is a writer based in Paris. This is his first article for *GQ.
This story originally appeared in the February 2017 issue with the title "The Untold Story of the Bastille Day Attacker."
