Survivors of the attack described how the seafront in the Riviera town looked like a “war zone” after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel zigzagged down it at high speed, deliberately targeting those celebrating France’s national day. A Paris court found the driver’s friends Chokri Chafroud and Mohamed Ghraieb guilty of participating in a criminal terrorist operation and jailed them for 18 years. A third man, Ramzi Arefa, accused of helping Lahouaiej-Bouhlel obtain a gun, was also found guilty and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Five others, four men and a woman, who were also on trial for links to the attack, were found guilty of “collaborating with a criminal to commit a crime”. An estimated 40,000 people had gathered on July 14, 2016 to watch a fireworks display when Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, began his fatal four-minute drive down Nice beach just before 11pm. He careered down the Promenade des Anglais in a white 21-tonne Renault for more than 2km, deliberately swerving into groups of people to cause the maximum number of deaths and injuries. Among the dead were 15 children, the youngest of whom was two years old. Police killed Lahouaiej-Bouhjlel, a French-Tunisian delivery driver known to police for petty crime, as he began firing a semi-automatic rifle into the crowds from the cab of his truck. Two days later, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, which came eight months and one day after a wave of terrorist shootings and bombings in Paris that killed 131 people, including 90 at the Bataclan concert hall – but the French counter-terrorism investigators unable to establish links between IS and truck driver. During the trial, which opened in September and was overseen by five professional judges instead of a jury, the court heard harrowing evidence from grieving families and survivors of France’s second-deadliest peacetime massacre. Witnesses described screams and bloodshed as the truck plowed into crowds. People gather around a makeshift memorial in July 20216 to pay tribute to the victims of the Nice beach attack. Photo: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images The court heard that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel could not have carried out the massacre without the “valuable help” of three friends. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel left clear hints to potential accomplices. Six minutes before launching the attack, he texted Arefa, 27, a French-Tunisian acquaintance who had supplied him with cannabis, cocaine and a gun, saying he wanted five more guns for “Chokri and his friends”. This involved another friend, Chafroud, 43, a fellow Tunisian who was struggling to find work and housing. Ghraieb, who was born in Tunisia but had French citizenship and worked as a hotel receptionist, was accused of having investigated the rental of a truck for Lahouaiej-Bouhlel while being fully aware of his “recent commitment to the nihilistic ideology of armed jihad”. The other five suspects, a Tunisian convicted in absentia and four Albanians, were sentenced to prison terms of two to eight years on charges of arms trafficking or criminal conspiracy, but with no links to terrorism. All suspects denied knowledge of or involvement in the attack. Chafroud, Ghraieb and Arefa suggested that Lahouaiej-Bouhel had created them. Two were photographed with him in the truck days before, but said they thought it was a vehicle from his workplace. The driver had been questioned by police three weeks before the Nice atrocity after his wife alleged he had subjected her to daily domestic violence in 2014. He was not remanded in custody and the president of the judges in the Paris trial said the officers’ attitude to allegations of violence were “cavalier”. Subscribe to This is Europe The most central stories and debates about Europeans – from identity to the economy to the environment Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had become interested in Islam, described as superficial, in the weeks before the attack and had visited jihadist websites. Chafroud was asked in court about the messages he sent to Lahouaiej-Bouhlel which said he was filling a truck with “2,000 tonnes of iron, cutting the brakes and I’ll be careful”. Chafroud told the court it was a joke and that he had been injured as a child when a friend of his was hit by a truck in front of him. Grieb, 47, denied any knowledge of the attack or terrorism. Asked why he had walked along the promenade after the attack to observe the aftermath, he said he was on his way home. Arefa, 27, had sold Lahouaiej-Bouhlel cannabis and cocaine and found him a gun through an Albanian drug contact. Asked by the judge what he thought the gun would be used for, Arefa said: “It may shock you, but I never asked myself the question.” He denied any knowledge of or connection to terrorism. As the trial closed on Monday, Alexa Dubourg, the attorney general, representing the state, stressed that the trial would not compensate for the “immense, unfathomable” pain of the bereaved or survivors who had recounted “the horror” of that day. However, he said the punishment had to fit the crime and those in the dock could not be held responsible for the full weight of the crime committed. Lawyers for Ghraieb and Chafroud had called for their acquittal, citing the “apparent poverty” of the evidence. The eight have 10 days to appeal their conviction and sentence.
