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TUNISIA – A Tunisian security source and a French police source said the 21-year-old Tunisian suspect in the Nice attack in France is Ibrahim El-Ouesawi.
The Tunisian source said Al-Awassawi hails from the village of Sidi Omar Bouhajla in Kairouan governorate, and recently resided in Sfax, noting that the police visited his family there on Thursday.
The French terrorism prosecutor said Thursday that the suspect in the attack inside a church in Nice arrived by train with an Italian Red Cross identity card, adding that he changed his clothes at the train station and then went to the church to start their attack.
Jean-Francois Ricard said the forward was Tunisian, born in 1999 and arrived in Bari, Italy, on October 9.
He explained that surveillance cameras showed the young man at the Nice train station, indicating that he was walking from there a distance of 400 meters to Notre Dame.
It was not clear if the attacker acted alone or if there is a group that supports him, while his arrival from Italy to France remains a mystery and raises questions about the security of the borders between European countries and the loopholes that facilitated his movement and the implementation of the bloody attack.
The attacker was initially reported to be a Tunisian immigrant who arrived illegally in France from the island of Lampedusa. Mohsen El-Daly, head of the media and communication unit of the Court of First Instance of Tunisia, said Thursday that the anti-terrorist judicial pole has opened an investigation into the alleged involvement of a Tunisian in the attack in the French city of Nice .
French police believe the attacker who killed three people in Nice today, Thursday, is Tunisian, but the democratic African country has taken important steps to combat the militant threat in recent years.
A French source said authorities believed that the attacker who beheaded an old woman and killed two other people in a church in the city of the Riviera region, a 21-year-old Tunisian, had recently entered France via Italy.
Five years after Islamist militants killed dozens of tourists in two indiscriminate shooting incidents in Tunisia, diplomats say, police have done much better at thwarting plots and acting swiftly to counter attacks when they occur, but a series of smaller and more sustained attacks shows that the threat still exists.
The Tunisians formed one of the largest squads of foreign fighters in ISIS, and although many of them died in the wars in Syria and Iraq, some of them returned to their country where the authorities imprisoned them.
At the same time, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group established a foothold in a large and inaccessible part of the hills in the Tunisian-Algerian border area, but was unable to launch attacks beyond that area.
The last major attack in Nice was also carried out by a Tunisian who emigrated to France in 2005 and collided with a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in 2016, killing 86 people.
The Tunisian Foreign Ministry condemned the attack in Nice on Thursday. Although the 2011 uprising succeeded in bringing democracy and freedom of expression to Tunisia, it did not mean an improvement in living standards or economic opportunities, but rather more young people sought to emigrate.
Italy said in September that the number of migrants arriving last year on ships that crossed the Mediterranean, often to the small island of Lampedusa, had been cut in half in part due to Tunisia’s economic troubles.
Lampedusa is only 130 km from the Tunisian coast, and young Tunisians living in coastal cities spoke of the constant temptation to board the boats that were always available and set out at night in the hope of obtaining riches in prosperous Europe.
