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French police arrest five in connection with truck attack

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French police arrested five people late Saturday evening in connection with the savage truck attack in the resort city of Nice — as ISIS took credit for the beachside bloodshed, calling the 31-year-old driver a “soldier” in the militant Islamic terror group.

An ISIS-run news outlet said the driver “carried out the operation in response to calls to target the citizens of coalition countries fighting the Islamic State.”

The statement neither named the driver — Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel from Tunisia — nor offered evidence the terror group helped plan the attack. Bouhlel drove a 19-ton truck through throngs of people who had gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks Thursday night, killing at least 84 people and injuring 202.

Police in Nice have said Bouhlel was known to them, but only as a petty criminal. His neighbors described the father of three as an angry man in the middle of a divorce, prone to drinking and womanizing. His father, from Tunisia, said Bouhlel did not pray or fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Bouhlel “radicalized very quickly,” which demonstrates the “extreme difficulty of the fight against terrorism.”

After an emergency security meeting yesterday, Cazeneuve promised to call up 12,000 police reserves to augment the 120,000-person security force ?already dispersed across France.

With three major terror attacks unfolding in France in the last 18 months, the government is coming under criticism for lax security at the Bastille Day celebration.

But Cazeneuve said that high security had been assured in the region — including at the Cannes Film Festival and the Nice Carnival. He told reporters Bouhlel drove the truck onto the sidewalk to dodge a police barricade blocking the Promenade des Anglais.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said five people are now in custody in connection with the truck attack. The office offered no details about the identities of those arrested or the reasons for their arrests.

The Boston Herald’s Brian Dowling and Associated Press contributed to this report