Islamic State claims responsibility for Bastille Day truck attack

The Islamic State claimed responsibility Saturday for the attack that killed more than 80 people in Nice, France, during the city’s Bastille Day celebration.

Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian man who lived in Nice, was identified by police as the driver of a truck that tore through a crowd on July 14. He was killed during an exchange of gunfire with police.

More than 200 people were injured in the assault. French president Francois Hollande said Friday that approximately 50 people were still in critical condition, and on Saturday French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve issued orders for “increased security” throughout the country, the Associated Press reported.

Islamic State’s Amaq news agency issued a statement Saturday:

“The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State. He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State.”

French authorities have not yet confirmed whether Bouhlel had any official ties to the Islamic State. But Cazeneuve said he had been radicalized “very rapidly,” the Washington Post reported.

The group took approximately 36 hours to claim responsibility for the attack. This falls above the average time the group normally takes to claim similar attacks, both those carried out by operatives or sympathizers, according to Rukmini Callimachi, a reporter for The New York Times who focuses on the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

12. So if we use time of claim as a metric for how clued in ISIS is to a given operation, Nice falls on the outer perimeter.

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) July 16, 2016

The group called Bouhlel a “soldier of the Islamic State,” using language that implies he was an operative of the group, rather than a sympathizer who took action independently, Callimachi said on Twitter.

15. That terminology, a soldier of the Islamic State, is what they use for their own operatives. Paris/Brussels attackers described as such

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) July 16, 2016

The timeline of this claim is similar to the attack on a San Bernardino office party by Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook. The two killed 14 people on Dec. 2, 2015, and on Dec. 5 the Islamic State called the pair “martyrs” in a news bulletin.

The Nice attack marks the latest in a series of killings by Islamic State operatives or sympathizers in July. On July 1, a gunman killed 20 people and took hostages in the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Islamic State also claimed a bombing in Baghdad earlier this month.