ROME: Italian police confirmed Thursday they have arrested a man suspected of supplying weapons to the man who rammed a truck into a Bastille Day crowd in the southern French city of Nice in 2016, killing 86 people.
Endri Elezi, a 28-year-old Albanian, is suspected of "supplying weapons to Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel", the Tunisian who carried out the attack on July 14, France's Bastille Day national holiday, a police statement said.
He was picked up on Wednesday evening at Sparanise, near the southern city of Naples, by officers acting on a European arrest warrant issued by the French authorities.
The arrest comes after the Paris appeals court in March ordered eight people to stand trial for their alleged role in the 2016 attack.
The trial will not take place until 2022.
Bouhlel himself was shot dead by police at the wheel of the vehicle he had used to kill people as they celebrated the holiday on Nice's waterfront, wounding more than 400 people.
It came less than a year after the deadly assaults in November 2015 that saw 130 people killed in bombings and shootings across Paris including at the Bataclan concert hall.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Nice attack, although prosecutors said there was no evidence that Bouhlel had sworn allegiance to the jihadist group.