ARRAS, FRANCE // A suspected militant overpowered by passengers on a packed Amsterdam-Paris train had visited Syria and was known to French and Spanish intelligence services, officials said on Saturday.
The suspect, identified as a 25-year-old Moroccan, was wrestled to the floor by three American passengers after opening fire with an assault rifle on a high-speed train on Friday evening and is now being interrogated by counter-terrorist officials near Paris.
A Spanish counter-terrorism source said he lived in Spain until last year before travelling to war-torn Syria from France.
French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve confirmed Spanish intelligence services had flagged the man to France “due to his membership of the radical Islamist movement”.
Armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, an automatic pistol, nine cartridge clips and a box-cutter, the attacker opened fire on board the high-speed train just after it crossed from Belgium into northern France on Friday evening.
But the attack was quickly stopped when two off-duty US servicemen and their friend charged the gunman and overpowered him.
“I looked back and saw a guy enter with a Kalashnikov. My friends and I got down and then I said ‘Let’s get him’,” Alek Skarlatos, a 22-year-old member of the National Guard in Oregon who recently returned from Afghanistan, told France’s BFMTV.
Spencer Stone, who serves in the US Air Force, was first to the gunman who slashed him in the neck and almost sliced off his thumb with a box-cutter.
“At that point, I showed up and grabbed the gun from him and basically started beating him in the head until he fell unconscious,” said Mr Skarlatos.
A British business consultant, 62-year-old Chris Norman, also assisted in subduing the man, and said he thought his gun may have malfunctioned.
“I don’t know why he didn’t manage to fire [more shots], but I think it’s because his weapon jammed,” he said.
“My first reaction was to hide, but my thought was I’m probably going to die anyway, I’d rather die being active, trying to get him down than simply sit in the corner and be shot.
“I don’t feel like a hero. If it wasn’t for Spencer, I think we would all be dead.”
He said Mr Stone had taken the gunman in a chokehold and Mr Norman took his right arm to stop him reaching his gun.
With the man floored, Mr Skarlatos left to search for more gunmen, while Mr Norman helped tie up the attacker with his tie.
Despite his own injuries, Mr Stone then went to help man who had been shot in the shoulder. Both were later hospitalised, but are said to be recovering well.
The train heroes are to be received by president Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace in the coming days.
Mobile phone footage from inside the train shows the suspect, a skinny man wearing white trousers and no shirt, flattened on the floor of the train with his hands and feet tied behind his back.
He was arrested when the train, with 554 passengers aboard, stopped at Arras station in northern France.
The third American, college student Anthony Sadler, said “I came to see my friends for my first trip to Europe and we stop a terrorist. It’s kind of crazy.”
Analysts said it was not surprising someone could launch an attack even though he was on a watch-list.
“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.
“It’s a very resource-intensive job to watch someone 24 hours a day. Intelligence agencies just aren’t big enough to do that for everyone,” he said.
France has been on high alert since gunmen went on the rampage in January, killing 17 people in Paris.
About 850 French and 300 Belgians have left to fight in Syria and Iraq, and hundreds have already returned, say intelligence officials, overwhelming their ability to monitor them all.
While passengers on Eurostar services between Paris and London must pass through airport-style security before boarding trains, passengers on services between Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam face no such checks.
* Agence France-Presse
