In an interview with Reuters, Alek Skarlatos of the National Guard said he and military member Spencer Stone did not hesitate to approach and thwart the attacker when he brandished a machine gun on the train. A shot was heard. Glass shattered. A bullet hit a passenger. A step behind them was a third friend, Pittsburg-born Anthony Sadler.
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“Bottom line is, being a family of faith, we firmly believe that God kept him safe amidst a unsafe situation and used him and his friends to potentially save many lives”.
The gunman overpowered by passengers on a train to Paris may be a radical islamist whose name is on police lists across Europe, France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said, as investigators interrogated the suspect near the French capital.
Stone and Skarlatos moved in to tackle the gunman and take his gun. “At the same time it’s kind of hard to associate this with your son, so there’s a sense of reality versus disbelief”. “Spencer Stone is a very strong guy”, Norman said. “I’d rather die trying to take this person down, ‘” Chris Norman told reporters Saturday. A Spanish official says the suspect in a shooting incident on an Amsterdam-Paris train had travelled to Syria. They have been hailed as heroes.
“That’s our friend. So once we saw him go, we had to go join him”, said Sadler.
The US airman who was stabbed while overpowering a gunman armed with a Kalashnikov on a Paris-bound train has spoken to the media for the first time. He, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone worked together to save hundreds in France. He was then hogtied.
A video that was originally posted on LiveLeak and then later removed, but reposted on YouTube, shows the men after subduing the gunman. Groans are heard as the men search for the tossed handgun. Both men stepped up to save lies, as well as one another.
Stone was severely cut in the neck and hand by the suspect but was released from a hospital Saturday. The men said he tried to shoot, but the gun failed to fire.
In France, all three men, along with a British passenger, were awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Hollande, who said they “gave us a lesson in courage, in will, and thus in hope”.
The men held the suspect and waited for authorities to arrive.
The gunman, identified as 26-year-old Moroccan Ayoub El-Khazzani, is detained and being questioned by French counter-terrorism police outside Paris.
Three people, including one of the Americans, Spencer Stone, were wounded in the attack.
If that guy’s weapons had been functioning properly, I wouldn’t even want to think about how it would have went. “It was really nothing more than that”, he said. “He had a box cutter and he started to go at me with that”.
“It feels unreal, like a dream”, Stone said.
“I’m just a college student, it’s my previous year in college”. “I’m not surprised he would do that. Spencer didn’t worry about his own injuries and was able to minister to the wounds”. My thought was, OK, probably I’m going to die anyway. “They were there to do what they had to do”.
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“Spencer actually had some emergency medical training through the service”, said Sadler’s father, who is also named Anthony Sadler. For a moment, the French passenger said, he thought the weapon was a toy. “And a lot of hugging and holding”.
