Anthony Sadler, Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos were aboard a high-speed train en route to Paris from Amsterdam on Friday when a gunman opened fire.
Advertisement
The Kalashnikov-toting attacker was removed from the Amsterdam to Paris train at Arras in northern France, as was an arsenal of weapons.
Around 850 French and 300 Belgians have left to fight in Syria and Iraq, and hundreds have already returned, say intelligence officials.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the passengers were “particularly courageous and showed great bravery in very hard circumstances”, adding: “Without their composure we could have been confronted with a bad incident”.
Passengers on the practice subdued the gunman and prevented additional carnage, stated Christophe Piednoel, spokesman for nationwide railway operator SNCF.
“My friend Alek yells, ‘Get him, ‘ so my friend Spencer immediately gets up to charge the guy, followed by Alek, then myself”, Sadler told CNN.
“I came in at the end of it all and helped get him under control”, he said at a news conference in Arras.
The 22-year-old Skarlatos was on a month-long vacation after his return from deployment in Afghanistan.
French investigators were on Saturday questioning the suspect who was overpowered by a group of passengers, including two US servicemen.
Mr Cazeneuve stressed that the identity of the suspect had not been “established with certainty”.
“It’s the perennial problem of how you prioritise between serious concerns”, said Raffaello Pantucci, counter-terrorism expert at Royal United Services Institute in London.
One vehicle away from the incident with his companion and two children, Anglade told Paris-Match, “We heard passengers shouting in English, ‘He’s firing, he’s firing. I would rather die being active, trying to get him down than simply sit in the corner and be shot”. A 26-year-old Moroccan man was arrested at Arras station.
Three Americans – two of them service members – helped foil a potentially deadly attack when they subdued an attacker on board a high-speed train bound for Paris, officials said.
The men then took action to tie up the gunman, as well as taking the precaution to stop the bleeding from his neck – which could have been life-threatening. His son then called him from a police station and recounted the intense and frightening encounter on the train with a man armed with a pistol, an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle and a knife. “People like us that are just living our lives”. Airman First Class Spencer Stone ran toward the gunman and tackled him.
The 554 passengers included French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, the star of Betty Blue and Nikita, who was lightly wounded breaking glass to sound the alarm.
She described the US passengers who helped as “big, strong, courageous guys and they love their country and they are both in the military and they are prepared, and so it doesn’t surprise us that they were capable of doing this”.
Advertisement
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.
