At the trial of the Nice attack, the court on Friday explored the double face of the assailant, who had been “sympathetic” and “smiling” with former conquests, without trace of the propensity for violence described by other members of his entourage. On July 14, 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian from Nice, killed 86 people while driving a ram truck on the Promenade des Anglais before being shot dead by the police.
“I didn’t know this July 14 monster, I didn’t know this barbarian, I knew someone completely different,” says E., 55 today, testifying by videoconference. This woman with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, in a light blue top, had met the author of the attack during salsa lessons in a gym and attended several months in 2014, before leaving him. ” lose sight of “.
She describes him as “nice”, “pleasant”, “always smiling”. “He wasn’t upset,” she says. Arms crossed, sometimes rubbing her forehead, embarrassed, E. repeats, as if to apologize: “Honestly, I don’t remember, you know, it’s been six years, that’s a long time ago. »
“Someone completely normal”
She concedes that he could be “heavy”, and was very flirty. “He offered everyone” to go to saunas, swingers clubs, “it was his thing,” she says. After meeting him again by chance at the end of June 2016, they resumed their exchanges of messages and saw each other once, on July 3. “He had changed physically,” she remarks. “He had lost weight, he had whitened his temples”, and had put it down to his “exhausting” job as a delivery driver.
She points out to him his “little budding beard”, he replies that it is “fashionable”. But there is nothing surprising in his behavior. “For me, he was a completely normal person.” The court read him other testimonies evoking a “perverse”, “disturbed” man, who “could be very aggressive”. She brushes them off: “If I had seen him like that, I wouldn’t have seen him.”
“Reserved”, “complexed” but “never angry”
“I have never seen him angry, I have never seen him behave inappropriately”, then abounds D., 67, long brown hair, in a jacket with golden buttons, who also knew Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel during a salsa lesson at the end of 2014, and began a relationship with him in the spring of 2015. He was not flirty but “reserved”, “complexed”, “not very sure of himself”, assures this Niçoise on the other hand with neatly manicured hands clasped in front of her.
“We saw each other two or three times a week”, but always on the initiative of the young man, and “I braked with four irons” to space out these meetings, she adds. At this time, “you were largely his first telephone contact”, remarked President Laurent Raviot to him. He “told me he had no friends and lately he seemed to be clinging to me,” D. had observed in front of the investigators.
When his face appeared on television, identifying him as the perpetrator, “I couldn’t realize. It was a shock. I could not make the link between the man I had known and the one who had become a criminal, ”she says.
Intimate relations with the former manager of a gay sauna
Thursday, the court had discovered yet another facet of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel with the testimony of R., 80 years old. This former manager of a gay sauna presented himself as a kind of “mentor” of the young Tunisian, whom he described as “very impressionable” and “weak of spirit”. He claimed to have also maintained intimate relations with him, between 2010 and 2014, then a friendship.
The man with a frail figure, youthful face, dyed hair, explained that one evening, a few months before the attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had shown him videos of abuses by the Islamic State group. “He said to me, ‘Do you want to see how people are treated there, in Syria?’ He opens his computer, and there, the horror, I see several people lying down, their heads were cut off with a knife. Faced with his dread, his friend would have replied: “I am used to it. “I didn’t think he could look at such things, him, the nice boy”, breathes R.