French police make five arrests in connection with Nice truck terror attack

Multiple arrests made in the wake of the fatal attack in southern France.

French police have arrested several people believed to be associated with Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the French-Tunisian responsible for the fatal attack on Nice this week. According to the Associated Press, five people have been held in total since the attack on 14 July.

One man was arrested on Friday night, after he brought a hooked 18in machete with him to a vigil for the victims. Crowds looked on in horror as he was seen with the weapon, but he is not believed to have attacked anyone before he was detained by police. It is unclear whether he has any connections to Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who was shot dead by police after murdering 84 people during Bastille Day celebrations and injuring more than 200, when he drove a truck through a crowd of 30,000.

A further three men are now reported to have been arrested in Nice on Saturday morning. According to one source, the arrests, made in two areas in the southern French city, were amongst the attacker's "close entourage". A Reuters reporter saw "about 40 elite police raid a small apartment at Rue Miollis, north of the central station, where one individual was arrested".

French police were also questioning the attacker's ex-wife yesterday, as they attempt to uncover his motives for the most brutal attack in the country since last November's terror strikes on Paris. Hajer Khalfallah, mother to his three children, is thought to have been in the process of divorcing him, amid claims that he beat her. Police seized computers from the couple's flat and are currently analysing it alongside a mobile phone found in the lorry where he died.

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, drove a lorry into crowds of thousands of revellers on Nice's Promenade des Anglais on Thursday night. His motives are currently unknown, and while police were aware of his past as a violent petty thief, he was not known to French anti-terror forces as a religious radical.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack. The terror group's propaganda arm, Aamaq News Agency, claimed Bouhlel "carried out the operation in response to calls to target the citizens of coalition countries fighting the Islamic State".