21-Jul-16: Lone wolf truck-ramming murderer transforms - yet again - into a far more lethal figure

The weapon in the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, France
[Image Source]

What we know, or were told we know, or thought or suspected we knew turns out - almost as we watch - to be very different. And what's different makes it much, much more threatening. (For background: "15-Jul-16: The terrorist vehicle-ramming murders in France: what the media see and won't see"] Above all, this was not, in any sense, an attack by a truck.

From Associated Press tonight:

The truck driver who killed 84 people on a Nice beachfront had accomplices and appears to have been plotting his attack for months, the Paris prosecutor said on Thursday. Prosecutor Francois Molins said five suspects currently in custody are facing preliminary terrorism charges for their alleged roles in helping 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel in the July 14 attack in the southern French city. Molins' office, which oversees terrorism investigations, opened a judicial inquiry Thursday into a battery of charges... The suspects are four men — two Franco-Tunisians, a Tunisian and an Albanian — and one woman of dual French-Albanian nationality, Molins said. The driver was a Tunisian man who had been living in Nice for several years. People close to Bouhlel said he had shown no signs of radicalization until very recently. But Molins said information from Bouhlel's phone showed searches and photos that suggested he could have been preparing an attack as far back as 2015.

Almost no aspect of what was suggested about the attacker in the hours and first days after the incredibly lethal assault by truck-ramming has remained in its original shape. This will not prevent the very same thing from happening next time there is a terrorist attack in which, as far as the naked eye can see, is done by an individual. He or she will be a lone wolf for media and government policy purposes until the facts make that theory impossible to sustain.

We, the civilized side, are not winning this ongoing war yet.