NICE, France—The rogue driver who turned a night of fireworks and fun into the worst carnage the French resort city of Nice has seen in decades appeared aloof and menacing to his neighbors and family, while authorities said Saturday that he had recently turned to religious extremism.
The Islamic State group claimed Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel as one of its “soldiers” on Saturday, but what little is known so far about the 31-year-old Tunisian suggests a troubled, unpleasant person who showed little outward interest in Islam.
Bouhlel was born in Msaken, a town in Tunisia, but moved to France years ago and was living in the country legally, working as a delivery driver. At one point he married, and later moved to an apartment bloc in the Quartier des Abattoirs—the Slaughterhouse District—on the outskirts of Nice.
Neighbors described the father of three as a volatile man, prone to drinking and womanizing, who was in the process of getting a divorce.
“I saw him four times a day,” said Jasmine Corman, who has lived in Bouhlel’s pale yellow apartment building for six months. “He wasn’t very nice. ... He was handsome, but his face was miserable.”
Back in Tunisia, Bouhlel’s father said his son was prone to violent episodes during which “he broke everything he found around him.”
“Each time he had a crisis, we took him to the doctor, who gave him medication,” Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel told BFM television, even showing journalists what he said was a document about his son’s psychiatric treatment.
Bouhlel said his son hadn’t visited Tunisia in four years and hadn’t stayed in contact with his family.
“What I know is that he didn’t pray, he didn’t go to the mosque, he had no ties to religion,” said the father, noting that Bouhlel didn’t respect the Islamic fasting rituals during the month of Ramadan—an account seconded by neighbors in Nice.
Bouhlel had had a series of run-ins with the law in France for threatening behavior, violence and theft over the past six years. In March, he was given a six-month suspended sentence by a Nice court for a road-rage incident in which he attacked another driver with a wooden pallet.
His court-appointed lawyer, Corentin Delobel, said he observed “no radicalization whatsoever” of Bouhlel and Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Bouhlel was never placed on a watch list for radicals.
