Eight people have been found guilty over their links to the terrorist who drove a heavy lorry into Bastille Day crowds in Nice in 2016, killing 86 people and injuring 450 others.
Survivors of the attack described how the seafront in the Riviera city resembled a “war zone” after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel zigzagged down it at high speed, deliberately aiming at those celebrating France’s national day.
A Paris court found the driver’s friends Chokri Chafroud and Mohamed Ghraieb guilty of being part of a criminal terrorist operation and jailed them for 18 years. A third man, Ramzi Arefa, accused of helping Lahouaiej-Bouhlel obtain a weapon, was also found guilty and given a 12-year jail term.
Five others, four men and a woman, who were also on trial over links to the attack, were found guilty of being “associated with a criminal with a view to committing a crime”.
An estimated 40,000 people had gathered on 14 July 2016 to watch a firework display when Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, began his deadly four-minute drive down the Nice seafront shortly before 11pm.
He careered down the Promenade des Anglais in a 21-tonne white Renault for more than 2km, deliberately swerving into groups of people to cause the maximum number of deaths and injuries. Among those killed were 15 children, the youngest of whom was two years old.
Police shot dead Lahouaiej-Bouhjlel, a French-Tunisian delivery driver known to police for petty crimes, as he began firing a semi-automatic rifle into the crowds from the truck’s cab.
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 in which 131 people died, including 90 at the Bataclan concert hall – but French anti-terrorism investigators were unable to establish any links between IS and the lorry driver.
During the trial, which opened in September and was overseen by five professional judges in place of a jury, the court heard harrowing evidence from grieving families and survivors of the second-most deadly massacre in peacetime France. Witnesses described the screams and bloodshed as the truck struck the crowds.
The court heard Lahouaiej-Bouhlel would not have been able to commit the massacre without the “precious help” of three friends.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel left clear pointers to potential accomplices. Six minutes before he began the attack, he sent a text message to Arefa, 27, a Franco-Tunisian acquaintance who had supplied him with cannabis, cocaine and a gun, saying he wanted five more weapons for “Chokri and his friends”.
This implicated another friend, Chafroud, 43, a fellow Tunisian who had been struggling to find work and accommodation. Ghraieb, who was born in Tunisia but had French nationality and was working as a hotel receptionist, was accused of having researched the lorry hire for Lahouaiej-Bouhlel while being fully aware of “his recent adherence … to the nihilistic ideology of armed jihad”.
The five other suspects, a Tunisian found guilty in absentia and four Albanians, were sentenced to prison terms of two to eight years on charges of weapons trafficking or criminal conspiracy, but without any terrorism link.
All the suspects denied knowledge of or involvement in the attack. Chafroud, Ghraieb and Arefa suggested Lahouaiej-Bouhel had set them up. 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 complained he had subjected her to daily domestic violence in 2014. He was not taken into custody and the president of the judges at the Paris trial said the officers’ attitude to the allegations of violence was “cavalier”.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had begun taking what was described as a superficial interest in Islam in the weeks before the attack, and had visited jihadist websites.
Chafroud was asked in court about messages he sent Lahouaiej-Bouhlel that mentioned filling a truck with “2,000 tonnes of iron, cutting the brakes and I’ll watch”. Chafroud told the court it was a joke and that he had been traumatised as a child when a friend was run over by a truck in front of him.
Ghraieb, 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 it was on his way home.
Arefa, 27, had sold Lahouaiej-Bouhlel cannabis and cocaine, and found him a weapon via an Albanian drug contact. Asked by the judge what he thought the gun would be used for, Arefa said: “It might shock you but I never asked myself the question.” He denied any knowledge of or link to terrorism.
As the trial closed on Monday, Alexa Dubourg, the advocate general, representing the state, stressed the trial would not compensate for the “immense, unfathomable” pain of the grieving or the survivors who had recounted “the horror” of that day.
However, she said the punishment had to fit the crime and those in the dock could not be made responsible for the entire weight of the crime committed.
Ghraieb’s and Chafroud’s lawyers had pleaded for their acquittal, highlighting the “manifest poverty” of the evidence.
The eight have 10 days to appeal against their conviction and sentencing.
