Hollande pinned a medal to each man’s shirt amid applause at the ceremony at Elysée Palace.
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President Francois Hollande said the two Americans who first tackled the gunman were soldiers, “but on Friday you were simply passengers”.
El-Khazzani, 25, was on the train with the AK-47, a “box cutter” knife, a Luger automatic pistol and extra ammunition when he began his attack. British businessman Chris Norman, who also jumped into the fray, also received the medal.
An official at Landstuhl told CBS News Tuesday morning that Stone would be treated at the base for the laceration to his thumb, a non-critical injury to his eye and other minor cuts and scratches. The three Americans and a British man who took down a heavily armed man on a passenger train speeding through Belgium have received the French Legion of Honor, France’s top honor.
Stone, wearing a sling on his left arm, was wounded in the attack and said he will receive further medical treatment in Germany.
Norman, an IT consultant who helped subdue the gunman, said he thought: “OK, I’m probably going to die anyway so let’s go”, the Guardian reported.
The three Americans happened to be in the right auto at the right time thanks to bad a WiFi signal.
Stone, a 23-year-old airman traveling with two friends on the train from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday, told reporters on Sunday of how he plugged the blood-spurting wound of another passenger with his fingers after himself being injured by the attacker, identified by security sources as a suspected Islamist militant.
Referring to the bravery of Sadler and Norman, he said they didn’t have military training and had “doubtless never seen a Kalashnikov in their life”.
“I kind of woke up from the middle of a deep sleep”, Stone said.
But his explanation grew less and less lucid, the prosecutor said, and the suspect eventually stopped speaking to investigators at all.
El Khazzani reportedly told police he found a bag in a park in Brussels containing guns and a knife and the idea came to him to rob people.
A spotlight is being cast on Ayoub El-Khazzani, the 26-year-old Moroccan who was wielding an AK-47 in a train before he was tackled, as judges in France decide what charges he will face.
The man Stone helped, a Franco-American Hollande named as Mark Moogalian, remains hospitalized.
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Armed with an arsenal of weapons and apparently determined, he presented a formidable challenge to the vacationing friends who snapped into action out of what Skarlatos said was “gut instinct“.
