US service member injured in train attack in France

The Pentagon says one U.S. military service member was injured Friday, apparently while trying to subdue a gunman who opened fire on a high-speed train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris.

A spokesman for France’s national railway company told the French daily Libération that passengers had overpowered the man. He was arrested at a train station in the northern French town of Arras.

Jean-Hugues Anglade, the French film star best known for his role in the 1986 erotic drama Betty Blue, was also reported to have been injured.

France has been on high alert for radical jihadism since the January shootings on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in January left 17 people dead and another attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris later that month.

According to CNN, the gunman, who was reportedly thwarted by two U.S. Marines in plain clothes aboard the train, was a Moroccan Islamist militant. Passengers and train personnel were attending to the wounded.

He was quoted by The Telegraph as saying that the two Americans who subdued the gunman were “particularly courageous and showed extreme bravery in extremely hard circumstances”.

The statement added the gunman, not identified yet, was arrested in Arras station in northern France.

“An important” police presence has been set up at the police station there, he said.

The men reportedly realized something was wrong when they heard what they knew to be a rifle being loaded in the restroom.

Michel said in a tweet: “I condemn the terrorist attack… and express my sympathy for the victims”.

Two of the victims are in a critical condition.

The French prosecutor’s office said that its anti-terrorist section has taken over the case, “in view of the weaponry used, the way it happened and the context”.

Friday’s attack came less than two months after a man in southeastern France attacked a chemical factory and decapitated his former boss, chaining the head to a fence.

“The French authorities have responded”.

Pierre-Henry Brandet, the ministry’s spokesman told the news channel BFMTV that it’s still too early to call it a terrorist attack.

Thalys is the high-speed red train which travels from Paris to Brussels in 1 hour 22 minutes, to Cologne, Germany, in 3 hours 14 minutes and Amsterdam in only 3 hours and 16 minutes.