What do we know so far about the Nice attacker

The latest information on the alleged identity of the man who brutally killed three people in the basilica of Nice, who immigrated illegally from Tunisia, has raised not a few protests from the French and Italian right

(photo: ERIC GAILLARD / POOL / AFP via Getty Images) The brutal murder of three people at Notre-Dame de l'Assomption basilica in Nice, France, on the morning of Thursday, October 29, was reportedly committed by Brahim Aoussaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian. years. As the mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi argues, there is no doubt about the terrorist motivations linked to the Islamic fundamentalism of the aggression: "The author of these acts continued to repeat in front of us 'Allah Akbar' during the on-site medical treatment". During the attack, after having slaughtered two parishioners and a sexton, the young man was shot by the police and is now under arrest in hospital.

According to reports from a local source - reports the online newspaper LaDepeche.fr - Aoussaoui has a clean record, who arrived in France a short time after landing in Lampedusa. On the Sicilian island he had been held in quarantine on board a motor ship for the risk of Covid-19 for two weeks, before becoming the recipient, on 9 October, of a rejection decree with the order of the commissioner to leave the Italian territory within 7 days. The young man, in fact, had arrived in Italy on 20 September, crossing the Mediterranean Sea with a so-called small boat, that is, in an irregular manner, and did not apply for asylum in France - where he claimed to want to go because "he had relatives".

Tunisia strongly condemned the attack, also announcing the opening of an investigation, reports Le Monde. "Following suspicions that a Tunisian citizen has committed a terrorist operation outside the country," said Mohsen Dali, deputy attorney general at the Tunisian court of first instance, questioned by the AFP news agency on the Nice attack. The investigations were also joined by France and Italy, to try to reconstruct Aoussaoui's path and network of contacts. As has already happened with other terrorist killings, however, perpetrated by men landed on the Sicilian coasts, such as Anis Amri (Berlin, November 16, 2016) and the Hanachi brothers (Marseille, October 1, 2017).

The attempts of exploitation by the right

The first to spread this detail on Twitter was the deputy from Nice Eric Ciotti, belonging to the French right, also claiming to have asked the president Emmanuel Macron, in a meeting at the site of the attack, to "suspend any migratory flow and any asylum procedure, especially at the Italian border". Even the Italian right, the Lega di Salvini in the first place, took the opportunity to raise yet another request to close the borders (even asking for the resignation of the Minister of the Interior Luciana Lamorgese as "moral responsible for what happened in Nice") .

Despite attempts by the European right, however, linking the problem of Islamist terrorism in the European Union is complicated. International police agencies agree that the link between the two phenomena is far from being demonstrated: indeed, according to the most recent Europol report, the growing brutality and clandestinity of human trafficking networks in the Mediterranean anti Covid-19 is a more frequent and worrying data than that of the risk of fundamentalist infiltrations among migrants.