How to restore the personality of a dead man when this man has committed the unthinkable, one of the most monstrous massacres imaginable? How to identify the deep motivations of a terrorist that everything suggests that he was very psychologically disturbed?
In the absence of psychiatric expertise, lack of established accomplices or a message of complaint written by him, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who killed eighty-six people while driving over the crowd, in a truck, on July 14, 2016 in Nice, took with he the mysteries of his senseless act.
Was the killer of the Promenade des Anglais insane? Was he depressed, suicidal and sadistic, radicalized or all of these? During a week of debates entirely dedicated to the personality of the terrorist, which ended on Friday 28 October, the special assize court of Paris tried to unravel the inseparable through the testimonies of a dozen of his relatives. Each gave a facet of the son, a piece of the brother, of the nephew, a memory of the lover, a fragment of the “monster”.
The exact nature of his troubles and the springs of his passage to the act have remained elusive. But, according to the questions, a mosaic has gradually emerged on the testimonies that sketches the portrait of an unstable man, intolerant to frustration, impulsive and violent, who presents narcissistic disorders, incapable of empathy, who “I didn’t give a damn about religion”but he had come to take a very superficial interest in Islam in the weeks leading up to his crime.
Ses parents et une de ses sœurs, tout d’abord, sont venus de Tunisie raconter à la barre son enfance dans une famille fruste et modeste de M’Saken, une petite ville du Sahel tunisien, son adolescence tourmentée, ses complexes de classe, his “oddities” of behavior, even his outbursts. Other relatives residing in France, an aunt, a brother-in-law, a cousin, his lover and his two lovers then recounted his years in Nice, his unhealthy obsession with sex, his wife, who beat with envy , “oddities”BIS.
“He hated himself”
From his youth in Tunisia, we have maintained a first character trait that seems to have followed the killer until his death at the age of 31: Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel did not love himself. “He hated himself”, summed up his aunt Rafika, one of the few members of his family to whom the terrorist remained linked after his departure for France. This self-hatred was coupled with a deep resentment towards her parents: “He had hate, he said they were rats, savages”said the old aunt, wrapped in a large black coat.
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