FROM his 12th floor cramped and shabby flat in Nice, France, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel plotted to turn a 19-ton refrigerator truck into a tank.

    On Bastille Day, that tank would take 10 children and many more parents with it as it veered violently from left to right down more than two kilometers of the seaside promenade.

    In its path was 27-year-old Parisian Timothy Fournier, who died in efforts to save his pregnant wife, and 11-year-old junior baseballer, Brodie Copeland, who was run down with his father Sean, along with hundreds of other men, women and children including 21-year-old Russian student, Victoria Savchenko.

    Those neighbors who knew Lahouaiej-Bouhlel at the apartments in Nice’s Quartier des Abattoirs told The New York Times he tended to grunt to “bonjour” and beat his wife.

    Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had only ever had one conviction before, for road rage, despite being known to police for violence and petty theft.

    A miscreant, no martyr

    Born in 1985 in Tunisia, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was not known by Tunisian authorities to hold extremist views, and while he held a French resident permit for the past 10 years, he never obtained nationality, according to Al Jazeera.

    To French authorities, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had remained under the radar, a miscreant but no martyr.

    His father, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej-Bouhlel told Agence France-Presse that his son had battled with depression.

    “From 2002 to 2004, he had problems that caused a nervous breakdown. He would become angry and he shouted … he would break anything he saw in front of him,” said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.

    “He didn’t pray, he didn’t fast, he drank alcohol and even used drugs,” he said.

    A neighbor who asked only to be identified as Jasmine told The Guardian U.K.: “He was quite handsome, greyish hair, looked a bit like George Clooney.”

    “He never answered when we spoke or said hello, he just sort of stared at us aggressively.”

    “I was really scared of him. All I knew is that he had trouble with his wife, but we never saw her or their kids. He spent a lot of his time at a bar down the street where he gambled and drank.”

    It remains unclear what drove Lahouaiej-Bouhlel to pile a truck with ammunition, grenades and guns and run down those families who spilled out from the cafes and restaurants on one of France’s most famous promenades to watch the fireworks.

    The 31-year-old’s modus operandi appears to come straight out of the Islamic State textbook.

    Just last month ISIS’s Cyber Caliphate channel promoted using cars for terrorism after its spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani urged followers to murder non-believers “with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.”

    But neighbors’ recollections of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel don’t point to a man of religious fervor — he often dressed in shorts, enjoyed salsa music and was not known to the mosques in Nice.

    A lawyer who previously defended Lahouaiej-Bouhlel has said that his former client “wasn’t very intelligent,” and that he “could have been influenced by religion.”

    Corentin Delobel defended Lahouaiej-Bouhlel against charges of assault earlier this year. At that time, he said that there were no signs that his client was radicalized, but regrets that his defense prevented Bouhlel from doing jail time.

    “I told myself I did my job,” he said. “But if I had done my job badly, he might be in prison, and he may have never done what he did.”

    The 31-year-old was given a suspended six-month prison sentence this year after being convicted of violence with a weapon, authorities said.

    Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a heavy drinker with a history of spousal abuse against his wife (the couple was in the process of divorcing), was “very much the stereotype of a petty criminal,” he tells CNN. “There was nothing that would have suggested in reality he was a jihadist.”

    Further arrests made

    On Sunday, French authorities arrested an Albanian couple in connection with the attack, the Paris prosecutor’s office spokeswoman told CNN.

    Agnes Thibault Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the anti-terrorism prosecutor, did not provide details on the couple’s connection to the terror attack.

    French authorities said six people are in custody in connection with the attacks. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s estranged wife was arrested at her apartment Friday and released Sunday morning without charge, her attorney, Jean-Yves Garino, told CNN. Garino said the woman, the mother of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s three children, had not been in contact with the attacker since they were in the middle of divorce proceedings.

    Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was shot to death by police after he barreled down the crowded Promenade des Anglais for more than a mile, crushing and hitting people who had gathered to watch fireworks.

    Prosecutors say Lahouaiej-Bouhlel sent a text message to someone just before the attack — telling them to “bring more weapons.”

    Authorities identified him by fingerprints after his identification card was found in the truck.

    ISIS: ‘Soldier’ behind attack

    ISIS’ media group, Amaq Agency, said Saturday that an ISIS “soldier” carried out the attack.

    In a statement, it said “the person ... carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of the coalition which is fighting the Islamic State.”

    Lahouaiej-Bouhlel hadn’t shown up on any anti-terrorist intelligence radar, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

    He had no record of making militant statements and was not known to the intelligence services, the minister said.

    “It seems he became radicalized very quickly,” Cazeneuve said Saturday, without offering specifics.

    The attacker sent a photo of himself from among the crowds celebrating Bastille Day shortly before he rammed his truck into them, his brother Jaber Bouhlel told CNN Arabic from his hometown of Msaken, Tunisia.

    Mohamed Bouhlel seemed “so happy and there was no sign that he was planning for something bad,” his brother said.

    The family is not releasing the photo to the media.

    Threat to France

    Cruickshank said “no country in the Western world is threatened more by jihadis and terrorism than France.”

    “This is a big step back here. They are absolutely exhausted after a year and a half of intense efforts to try and protect this country,” he said.

    “The painful reality here is that if it wasn’t going to be this promenade, it would have been any other promenade.”

    France had put intense security in place for Euro 2016, the international soccer tournament that just ended. No major attacks occurred during the event.

    About 85 people are still hospitalized in the wake of Thursday’s attack, with 29 patients in intensive care, said Marisol Touraine, French minister of social affairs and health.

    Around 500 people in Nice have sought psychological support in the aftermath of the attack, she said. (SD-Agencies)