Terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who murdered 84 people in the south of France on Thursday flouted every rule of Islam, his cousin has told MailOnline.
The 31-year-old – who wreaked terror on the Nice seafront as he turned an evening celebrating Bastille Day into a night of terror drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs.
He never prayed or attended a mosque, and hit his wife – with whom he had three children aged five, three and 18 months – and was in the process of getting a divorce.
Bouhlel, who had been known to the French police since January, had been on the radar for six months for petty criminality.
It is understood he lost his job as a delivery driver when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into four cars and had also been involved in a bar brawl.
Walid Hamou, a cousin of Bouhlel’s wife Hajer Khalfallah , told MailOnline “Bouhlel was not religious. He did not go to the mosque, he did not pray, he did not observe Ramadan.
“He drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs. This is all forbidden under Islam.
”He was not a Muslim, he was a s***. He beat his wife, my cousin, he was a nasty piece of work.
On Thursday, he was stopped by police just hours before he crushed scores of people underneath the wheels of his 25 tonne truck and fired shots indiscriminately at police and innocent bystanders.
He told officers that he was delivering ice-cream to the area and was allowed to park on the waterfront for several hours.
Horrifying footage of the moment the truck turned into a deadly juggernaut were uploaded online within minutes, showing a trail of dead bodies left in its path.
Bouhlel’s wife was taken into protective custody by police on Friday morning.
Some 202 people were injured in the attack; 52 are critical, of whom 25 are on life support. Ten of the dead were children.
France President, Francois Hollande, who is in Nice, said the attack was of “an undeniable terrorist nature”.
He said the battle against terrorism would be long, as France faced an enemy “that will continue to attack those people and those countries that count liberty as an essential value”.
Hollande said the attack was carried out “to satisfy the cruelty of an individual or possibly a group” and that many of the victims were foreigners and young children.
“We will overcome the suffering because we are a united France,” he said.
A state of emergency, in place since November’s Paris attacks carried out by militants from the so-called Islamic State group, in which 130 people died, has been extended by three months.
