French authorities arrest 5, call up police reservists in connection with Nice attack

(Image credit: Valery Hache/Getty Images)

published 17 July 2016

Law enforcement in Nice, France, have detained at least five people as of Sunday morning in connection to Thursday night's truck attack on Bastille Day revelers which left at least 84 dead.

The most recent three arrestees are part of the dead attacker's "close entourage," police said, though it is still unclear whether they had any substantial connection to outside terrorist organizations like the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility. "Investigators still have not discovered a direct link between Islamic State and the attacker," said Edwin Bakker, a professor with expertise in terrorism at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, "so it is a cheap claim."

The French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has also called some 12,000 police reservists into action "because of the terrorist threat," increasing the number of police and soldiers providing law enforcement services in France by 10 percent. Cazeneuve encouraged "patriotic citizens" to become reservists, too, as France's state of emergency in place since November was extended for another three months.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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