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The Untold Story of the Bastille Day Attacker

By Scott Sayare
January 24, 2017



Last July, France witnessed the creation of a new kind of mass murder when a man steered a giant cargo truck into a crowd and killed 86 people in the beach resort of Nice. The French government quickly announced that the killer was a jihadist inspired by the Islamic State. But as Scott Sayare discovered, the truth is a lot stranger.

On a Monday this past summer, a man phoned a rental agency on the outskirts of Nice, on France’s shimmering Mediterranean coast, to inquire, in what the receptionist would later recall as hesitant French, about a large cargo truck. He would be moving to Montpellier in a week, on July 11, the man said. No trucks were available for that date. Perhaps his move could wait, the man replied, and he signed off without any apparent frustration. For a short time, then, calamity was deferred, though hardly anyone could have known this.

Some in Nice knew the man as one of the many playboy predators the city seems to beget—black hair slicked back off a shining brow, dress shoes tapering to varnished points, a dark shirt unbuttoned low to reveal the pectorals into which he had obsessively, unblushingly, invested himself. He was 31 but preferred older women, both for their erotic openness and, it seems clear, for their money. Those who knew him best knew him to be a cold and brutal man, detached, amused by little save rough sex and gore.

He lived inconspicuously enough, however, working as a deliveryman, driving a 13-ton truck. In late June, though, he had taken several weeks off, and now seemed to those he encountered to be restless and bored, or perhaps under the sway of some deepening madness, as several witnesses have testified. Had he been another man, he might have chosen to spend his vacation with his three young children, but they had never stirred in him any great tenderness, and to see them would have meant arranging things with his estranged wife. Rather, as usual, he pedaled his blue bicycle around the city, shot selfies, and phoned loose acquaintances, harassing them with calls and text messages. The man called his sister’s husband, whom he saw perhaps once a year. “I thought he wanted to hurt me, because I’m in serious conflict with his sister,” the brother-in-law told police. He agreed to meet the man but brought a screwdriver for protection. “He talked to me about his life,” the brother-in-law said, “about his work as a deliveryman, about women, about his big sex drive, about his need to seduce and sleep with women, about his father, whom he hates.” The screwdriver wasn’t necessary.

For much of his vacation, the man passed the time browsing the Internet. “Terrible deadly accident,” “horrible deadly accident,” “shocking video not for the faint of heart,” he typed. For months, he had been watching beheadings; he kept an image folder filled with corpses and viscera. The particulars—the identities of the dead, the motives of the killers—were not of any evident interest; any butchery would do. And yet much of the violence he watched was political violence. Perhaps this was inevitable. Never before has so much recorded sadism been so widely available. For this, the world has the Islamic State to thank. A man transfixed by blood would hardly have to subscribe to the jihadist group’s ideology to enjoy its work; it is undoubtedly the best on offer.

In the final two weeks of his life, however, and perhaps for the first time, the man appeared to develop an interest in Islam, the religion into which he had been born. He played recitations of the Koran in his car; he criticized a friend for listening to music; he began to grow a beard. Online, he researched the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a killing carried out in the name of the Islamic State.

Also in evidence on the man’s computer was his apparent fascination with the crowds drawn each summer to the Promenade des Anglais, on Nice’s tranquil coastline, where on July 14 the city’s Bastille Day fireworks can be watched unobstructed, reflected in the black mirror of the sea.



Continued below:

http://www.gq.com/story/nice-france-bastille-day-attack-untold-story