Nice attack: Two more arrested by French police over killings

Police investigating the killing of 84 people in Nice arrested two more people in the city as France entered its second of the three days of national mourning for the victims of the massacre.

A man and a woman were arrested in Nice on Sunday morning, bringing the total number of people detained over the killings to seven.

About 85 people remain in hospital after the attack, and 18 of them — including one child — are in a life-threatening condition, the French health minister said. Marisol Touraine urged any survivors to seek counselling offered by the government after the Bastille Day attack .

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The French National Assembly (from top L clockwise), the London Eye, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge in Newcastle, the French Embassy in Berlin, the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Negresco Palace in Nice, Mexican Independence Angel monument in Mexico City, the Tel Aviv city hall, Mexican Senate building in Mexico City, Athens’ City Hall, the Campidoglio in central Rome, illuminated with the colours of the French flag in tribute to the victims after the deadly attacks in Nice. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Islamic State claimed it carried out the attack. In an online statement through news agency Amaq, it described the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, as one of its “soldiers”carrying out the “operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State”.

No Irish citizens were among the dead or wounded, according to the latest information available to Irish authorities. An Irishman who was missing since Thursday has been found safe and uninjured.

It is understood he was in the Far East all along.

The Department of Foreign Affairs said it received more than 60 enquiries expressing concern about one or more Irish citizens in the area. The vast majority of those concerned have been accounted for and are safe, it said.

However, the department is continuing to work to establish contact with a small number of people with whom contact has not yet been made. “The department has no reason to believe that any of these have been caught up in the incident,” a statement said.

The first three people arrested were detained after police special forces raided at least one address in Nice at 6am on Saturday.

A fourth man was arrested as part of the investigation on Friday night, while the ex-wife of the Tunisian who carried out the atrocity is also in police custody.

Some 25 people remained on life support today after the attack in which a lorry careered through crowds watching a Bastille Day fireworks display on the Promenade des Anglais in the Mediterranean city on Thursday night.

The driver, 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was shot dead by police during the attack.

French authorities have yet to produce evidence that he had turned to radical Islam. Nevertheless, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Bouhlel may have undergone a rapid change.

As the three days of national mourning began, the French tricolour flew at half mast from public buildings and soldiers patrolled the major cities. French president François Hollande chaired a meeting of security and defence chiefs at the Élysée Palace at 9am, having decided to extend by a further three months a state of emergency that was put in place after multiple terrorist attacks in Paris last November.

Police are still trying to establish whether Bouhlel acted alone or belonged to a network that had eluded the intelligence services. The heavy-goods vehicle driver, who rented the 19-tonne lorry in the days leading up to the attack, had one conviction for a road rage incident that occurred three months ago, but prosecutor François Molins said he was “completely unknown” to the intelligence services.

Mr Molins said the authorities would try to determine whether the attacker had accomplices. “It will also try to find out whether Mohamed Laouaiej Bouhlel had ties to Islamist terrorist organisations,” he told a press conference in Nice on Friday. Although the attack has not been claimed by any outfit, “this sort of thing fits in perfectly with calls for murder from such terrorist organisations,” Mr Molins said.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said no Islamist link had been identified as of Friday, though prime minister Manuel Valls said the driver was “a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another”.

When police examined the vehicle after the attack, they found a bicycle, an automatic pistol, two fake assault rifles, a nonfunctioning grenade, a mobile phone and some papers.

Police carried out a controlled explosion on a white van near Bouhlel’s home, in a residential neighbourhood in northern Nice. The explosion blew the doors open and shattered glass, but it was not clear whether they found anything incriminating. Bouhlel was legally resident in France, having left his Tunisian home town Msaken, near the coastal city of Sousse, a number of years ago.

With presidential and parliamentary elections just a year away, the latest atrocity was seized on by Mr Hollande’s opponents as proof of wider security failings at home. Christian Estrosi, a security hardliner and mayor of Nice until last month, said he had written to Mr Hollande on the eve of the attack to demand more funding for police.

“As far as I’m concerned, I demand answers, and not the usual stuff,”

Mr Estrosi said on BFM TV, asking whether the government provided enough national police officers for the fireworks display. Mr Valls later said security for the display was at the same level as for Euro

2016 events, where the police presence was greater than usual due to fears of terrorist attacks.

If police confirm a link between Bouhlel and jihadi networks in France, it will raise further difficult questions for the authorities in a city where dozens of would-be jihadis have been recruited.

The French administrative department of Alpes-Maritimes, of which Nice is the capital, said at the end of last year that 236 individuals had been monitored over several months as part of a surveillance programme and that it was tracking five new individuals every week. The region of just over a million people is thought to be home to 10 percent of all of French citizens gone abroad to join radical Islamist groups.