The French flag is lowered to half-mast in tribute to the lives lost during the Nice attack on July 14 (XINHUA)

The delivery man who drove a lorry that killed 84 people and injured dozens more in Nice on July 14 put France under the global spotlight for its security situation once more.

French President François Hollande said the attack was of "an undeniable terrorist nature," and that the battle against terrorism would be long.

Investigators are still trying to determine whether this was the act of an unhinged man or a converted jihadist who benefited from complicity in planning the attack.

Terrorism and insanity 

The killer was identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Franco-Tunisian citizen. The man's father, a cattle breeder back in Tunisia, described his son as depressive in the early 2000s. He insisted his son had "no connection with religion. He did not pray, he did not fast, he drank alcohol, and he even took drugs."

Bouhlel was known to the police for making threats, violence, theft and vandalism between 2010 and 2016. On March 24, he was given a six-month suspended sentence for an armed assault committed three months prior.

He had never been on record for radicalization, thus making him an ideal candidate for the Islamic State group (ISIS), which claimed responsibility for the massacre. Whether he had been in contact with ISIS or not, it was another opportunity for the terrorist group to take credit for such an attack.

The massacre of Nice is reminiscent of a previous assault on the French city of Dijon in December 2014. A motorist trampled 13 people while shouting "Allah Akbar." However, the perpetrator had made over 150 visits to psychiatric hospitals, and the incident was eventually judged not to be a terrorist attack.

Research from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism under the University of Maryland has shown that groups like Al-Qaeda "have typically not been interested in recruiting mentally unstable individuals, who are generally neither reliable nor controllable." Nonetheless, the emergence of ISIS may have changed this pattern. For ISIS, anyone may be recruited, not necessarily to operate from Syria, Iraq, or Libya, but wherever the would-be terrorist is able to carry out an attack. Whether potential recruits are mentally healthy or not is inconsequential so long as they can be of use to the group. Through social media and their magazines, in both English and French, they target the mentally unhinged to carry out terrorist attacks on their behalf.

One such example was a recruitment video aimed at French Muslims, released by ISIS in November 2014, that called on jihadists to attack in France if they could not reach ISIS-held territory. In the wake of the attacks on November 13, 2015, ISIS has continued to incite French citizens to commit violence and threatened further attacks on France and other Western countries.

Having assumed responsibility for the Nice attack, ISIS stated that Bouhlel was a "soldier" acting in response to their calls to target citizens of coalition nations engaged in fighting the "Islamic State." Similar statements have been made after past attacks. For example, the group described the May 2015 shooters in Garland, Texas and the couple who assaulted a holiday party in San Bernardino, California in December 2015 as ISIS "soldiers." Omar Mateen, who repeatedly pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on the night of his attack on an LGBT nightclub in Orlando of Florida in June, was described as a "fighter" for the organization.

Way of recruitment  

It is still too early to ascertain if Bouhlel was recruited or not. Whether he was under their influence or acted from inspiration should be revealed by the judiciary investigation.

Yet, it is worth noting that Islamist radicalization and recruitment have often occurred in prisons, where the inmate population is disproportionately Muslim. This is corroborated by the number of notorious French-born jihadists who have reportedly been radicalized in prison, for example, Charlie Hebdo assailant Chérif Kouachi and kosher supermarket gunman Amédy Coulibaly, both of whom spent significant time in prison before they carried out their attacks in January 2015.

Like Bouhlel, many of these terrorists were not particularly religious for much of their lives. Many had violent tendencies and were unbalanced, with an anti-social pattern of behavior. However, when they commit horrific crimes, they often claim to act in the name of God. Such people are obvious targets for terrorist groups, regardless of their religious history.

Copyedited by Dominic James Madar

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