The Untold Story of the Bastille Day Terrorist

GQ recently published an article profiling the terrorist and revealing the days leading up to the Bastille Day attack which killed 86 people in Nice, France on July 15, 2016. Check out the article below.- Desiree

On a Monday this past summer, a man phoned a rental agency on the outskirts of Nice, on France’s shimmering Mediterranean coast, to inquire, in what the receptionist would later recall as hesitant French, about a large cargo truck. He would be moving to Montpellier in a week, on July 11, the man said. No trucks were available for that date. Perhaps his move could wait, the man replied, and he signed off without any apparent frustration. For a short time, then, calamity was deferred, though hardly anyone could have known this.

Some in Nice knew the man as one of the many playboy predators the city seems to beget—black hair slicked back off a shining brow, dress shoes tapering to varnished points, a dark shirt unbuttoned low to reveal the pectorals into which he had obsessively, unblushingly, invested himself. He was 31 but preferred older women, both for their erotic openness and, it seems clear, for their money. Those who knew him best knew him to be a cold and brutal man, detached, amused by little save rough sex and gore.