Three Americans Foil Terror Attempt on French Train

When a gunman opened fire on a 500-passenger train from Amsterdam to Paris Friday afternoon (August 21), it appeared the scene would end in a bloodbath. All three of us started punching him and grabbed him again and put him unconscious while Alek was hitting him.

Airman Spencer Stone, National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, and their friend Anthony Sadler, overpowered a gunman on board a high-speed train on Friday.

REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer French President Francois Hollande (L) awards U.S. Airman First Class Spencer Stone (R) with the Legion d’Honneur (the Legion of Honour) medal during a ceremony at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, August 24, 2015.

Mark Moogalian, 51, an American-born French national who tried to stop the gunman, is in hospital with gunshot wounds.

Khazzani, a Moroccan, is suspected of having ties with global terrorist groups.

El-Khazzani’s lawyer says he’s not a terrorist and was only planning to rob people on the train. So now he’s in France, not Spain.

Khazzani is detained and being questioned by French counterterrorism police outside Paris. He said the men had given a lesson in courage.

“What happened and what we did, it just feels unreal”, Mr. Skarlatos said in the Skype interview with The New York Times. “There wasn’t much thinking”.

According to Sadler, the trio was initially sitting in a different carriage, but a bad WiFi connection led them to get up and move to what became the scene of the attack. A fourth man, British businessman Chris Norman, was also honored today. He said he kept the position until paramedics arrived.

The man, named by French and Spanish sources close to the case as Ayoub el Khazzani, told David he found the Kalashnikov he was carrying in a park near the Gare du Midi rail station in Brussels where he was in the habit of sleeping. The French then informed Belgium, but it was not clear what, if any, action was taken after that.

El-Khezzani’s lawyer said her client does not understand the suspicions, media attention or even that a person was wounded.

Stone’s and Skarlatos’ military training kicked in while they provided first aid and searched the train to make sure there were no other gunmen, they said.

It was also claimed that the suspected gunman meant to rob passengers, and that he denied any intention of waging a jihadist attack. He ran away with the gun, only to be shot in the neck with a concealed sidearm.