Nice attacker radicalised fast, 18 people still in critical condition

The man who killed 84 people in Nice by driving a truck at a crowd had been radicalized recently and quickly, France’s Prime minister Manuel Valls told a newspaper as a further 18 victims remain in critical condition.

The attack on Thursday during Bastille Day celebrations plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after jihadi gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.

The attacks, along with one in Brussels four months ago, have shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.

France’s health minister Marisol Touraine said 85 people are still in hospital following the attack, 18 of them, including one child, are in a critical condition. 29 people are in intensive care, while only person who was killed in Thursday’s attack was yet to be identified.

Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31-year-old delivery driver, Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any actual links to Islamic State. The Islamist militant group claimed the attack though, and Valls said there was no doubting the assailant's motives.

"The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalized very quickly," Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview with newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

As of Sunday no evidence had been produced to show how he underwent that rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion.

Relatives and friends interviewed in Nice painted a picture of a man who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and according to French media even ate pork, behavior that would be unlikely in a devout Muslim.

A report in the Nice Matin newspaper on Sunday said investigators had found no radicalization material in his flat, although they were still looking at his telephone and his computer.

As authorities were trying to better understand his motives, two more people, a man and a woman close to Bouhlel, were arrested in Nice early on Sunday.

Three others arrested previously were still being held, but Bouhlel's estranged wife was released without charges after being held since Friday.

Valls defended France's record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years and said the group's modus operandi of cajoling unstable people into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible was difficult to combat.

"Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts...this is probably what happened in Nice's case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and the far-right over how President Francois Hollande's Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no such thing as zero risk and that new attacks would occur.

"I've always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It's a difficult thing to say, but other lives will be lost."

With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, French opposition politicians are increasing pressure and seizing on what they described as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2 km (1.5 miles) through large crowds before it was finally halted.

After Thursday's attack, a state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris was extended by three months and military and police reservists were to be called up.