National Guard soldier Alek Skarlatos said in an interview that his friend, Spencer Stone, who is also in the military, did not hesitate when he spotted the gunman holding what appeared to be a machine gun and tackled him.
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“As he was cocking it to shoot it, Alek just yells, ‘Spencer, go!’ And Spencer runs down the aisle”, Sadler said. “We got the terrorist”.
Passengers helped apprehend a suspect armed with an automatic firearm and a bladed weapon who injured three people on a high-speed train in northern France, authorities for the government and the railway company said Friday.
French authorities have been on heightened alert since Islamic extremist attacks in January left 20 people dead, including the three attackers.
‘In the aftermath, we saw that a man’s throat had been split and he was bleeding profusely, ‘ Sadler said.
In Washington, the Pentagon said it “can only confirm that one U.S. military member was injured in the incident”. “It could have been a real carnage, there’s no question about that”, he added.
“Then during the process, the guy actually came out, he pulled out a cutter and started cutting Spencer”, he said. She said the attacker, who also had a knife, cut Stone, but that his injuries were not considered life-threatening. Skarlatos told Reuters that he had recently returned from Afghanistan and was vacationing in Europe.
Skarlatos’s father, Emanuel, told NBC station KGW that his son called him from a police station to tell him what happened on the train.
The attack took place at 1545 GMT while the Thalys train was passing through Belgium, according to a statement from the office President Francois Hollande. A White House official said Obama “expressed his profound gratitude for the courage and quick thinking of several passengers, including U.S. service members, who selflessly subdued the attacker”.
He said it’s too early to know whether the attack was terror-related.
The suspected gunman, a Moroccan national, was on the radar screen of European counterterrorism agencies for his radical jihadist views, the European counterterrorism official said.
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A French Interior Ministry spokesman said investigators were working determine a motive.
