French authorities detained two more people Sunday and released the estranged wife of the slain Nice truck attacker from custody as they tried to determine whether he had been an Islamic extremist or just a very angry man.
The Bastille Day carnage wrought by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel on the seafront of the southern Mediterranean city claimed the lives of at least 84 people and wounded 202, including many tourists from other countries.
About 85 people remained hospitalized Sunday, and of those, 18 including a child were still in life-threatening condition, Health Minister Marisol Touraine told reporters on a visit to the city.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said only 35 bodies have been definitively identified so far, carried out by specialists with a judicial official present. That left 49 bodies still without identification. Touraine also said one of the hospitalized wounded still has not been identified.
A man and a woman were detained Sunday morning in Nice, according to an official with the Paris prosecutor’s office, which oversees national terrorism investigations.
Shortly afterward, Bouhlel’s estranged wife, who was arrested Friday, was released from custody, according to an official in the Paris prosecutor’s office. She is the mother of Bouhlel’s three children and was in the process of divorcing him.
In total, six people now remain in custody relating to the truck attack – but officials have provided no details about their identities.
Investigators are hunting for possible accomplices to Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years. He was killed by police after ramming his truck through crowds after a holiday fireworks display Thursday night.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack, but it’s unclear whether Bouhlel had concrete links to the group. ISIS said he was following their call to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists.
Neighbors described the attacker as volatile, prone to drinking and womanizing. His father, in Tunisia, said his son did not pray or fast for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.
But French authorities believe that something may have changed. Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that authorities “now know that the killer radicalized very quickly.”
“(IS) is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks . . . that is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack,” he said Sunday.
Nice’s famous Promenade des Anglais, the site of the slaughter, has reopened.