Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel is seen giving the finger while at the steering wheel of the truck he used to kill 84 people in Nice, in the latest pictures to emerge of the 31-year-old Tunisian.
Apparently taken days before he drove into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in the southern French city, the image also shows an unidentified man sitting on the other side of the cab. A second picture shows him standing by the 19-tonne white lorry, grinning for the camera, alongside a man wearing a Paris Saint-Germain football shirt.
French prosecutors have described the massacre on the Promenade des Anglais as a “premeditated, prepared and planned” attack. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had grown a beard in the eight days before he carried out the attack and told friends “the significance of the beard is religious”, prosecutor François Molins told reporters on Monday.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had not previously shown any sign of being religious, and “ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and had a promiscuous sex life”, Molins said, outlining police evidence.
Investigators had found no proof of any “allegiance or any direct link” to Islamic State or other terrorist organisations, according to Molins. However, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s computer contained violent images from radical Islamic sites and links to jihadi websites, as well as articles about the Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice, the recent nightclub attack in Orlando, shootings in Dallas, the killing of two police officers in the Parisian suburb of Magnanville, and research into Osama bin Laden and the Algerian terrorist leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar.
As Nice showed signs of slowly returning to normality – with joggers, cyclists and sunbathers making the most of blazing sunshine – the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, urged MPs to back a three-month extension of the emergency powers imposed after the Paris attacks last November.
“We need people to stay together, we want to move fast with broad backing,” said the government spokesman, Stéphane Le Foll.
Speaking ahead of Tuesday evening’s parliamentary debate on the state of emergency, Le Foll said President François Hollande’s Socialist government was willing to consider a longer, six-month extension in line with demands from rightwing members of the national assembly.