PARIS -- Three Americans are being touted as heroes for subduing a heavily armed man who opened fire Friday aboard a high-speed train as it sped through Belgium. Authorities said the suspected gunman was found to have ties to radical Islam and was being watched in three European countries as potentially dangerous.
Two of the three Americans were servicemen -- one in the Air Force and the other in the National Guard. The third man was their friend, a student. The three tackled and disarmed the gunman, with the help of a British businessman.
In custody Saturday was Ayoub El-Khazzani, 26, who was being questioned by French counterterrorism police after it was confirmed through fingerprints that he has been on their terror-suspect radar since February 2014.
As the Amsterdam-to-Paris train, carrying more than 500 people, passed through Belgium, a French citizen on his way to the restroom encountered the gunman, who had a Kalashnikov rifle strapped across his shoulder.
The passenger threw himself onto the man.
During the passenger's struggle with the gunman, the gun went off several times. A bullet hit a passenger. Then, the gunman proceeded down the aisle in the carriage, holding the rifle and a Luger pistol.
Americans Airman Spencer Stone, 23, of Carmichael, Calif.; Anthony Sadler, 23, a senior at Sacramento State University in California; and Alek Skarlatos, 22, a National Guardsman from Roseburg, Ore., were traveling together. They heard the shots.
Sadler said they saw a train employee sprinting down the aisle followed by a man with an automatic rifle.
"As he was cocking it to shoot it, Alek just yells, 'Spencer, go!' And Spencer runs down the aisle," Sadler said.
Stone sprinted through the carriage toward the gunman, running "a good 10 meters to get to the guy," Skarlatos said. Stone was unarmed. The gunman was having trouble firing one of his weapons.
With Skarlatos close behind, Stone grabbed the gunman's neck, stunning him. The gunman fought back, furiously lashing out with a blade, slicing Stone in the neck and hand, and nearly severing Stone's thumb. Stone did not let go.
Chris Norman, the British businessman, said he was working on his computer when he heard a shot and glass breaking, and saw the train worker running from the gunman.
"He had a Kalashnikov, he had a magazine full. .... My thought was, 'OK, probably I'm going to die anyway. So, let's go,'" Norman said. "I'd rather die being active." So, Norman jumped up and joined the fray.
The gunman had "pulled out a cutter, started cutting Spencer," Norman said. "He cut Spencer behind the neck. He nearly cut his thumb off."
Skarlatos grabbed the gunman's pistol and threw it to the side. The gunman yelled at the men to return it, even as Stone was choking him. A train conductor rushed up and grabbed the gunman's left arm, Norman recalled.
The AK-47 had fallen to the gunman's feet. Skarlatos picked it up and "started muzzle-thumping [the gunman] in the head with it," he said.
By then Sadler had joined in the scuffle. The gunman "put up quite a bit of a fight," Norman recalled Saturday.
Stone, wounded and bleeding, held the gunman in a chokehold, Norman said. The gunman passed out. Norman pulled off his tie and used it to bind the gunman's hands.
Sadler said that even though Stone, a trained medic, was injured, he went to aid an injured passenger. "Without his help, he would've died; that man was bleeding from his neck profusely," Sadler said.
After the mayhem
The train was rerouted to Arras in northern France, the nearest station, where El-Khazzani was arrested.
The bullet-hit passenger, a dual French-American citizen, was flown by helicopter to a hospital in nearby Lille. The injured Stone was taken to a different Lille hospital for treatment of his hand injury. He was released at day's end. Police in Arras questioned Skarlatos and Sadler.
On Saturday night, a heavily guarded cortege arrived at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Paris, apparently escorting the three Americans there.
President Barack Obama called Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler to commend and congratulate them, the White House said.
French President Francois Hollande's office said Hollande spoke Saturday with the Americans to thank them for their efforts in foiling the attack. He planned to meet them and the Frenchman, who first confronted the gunman, at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Monday.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve added the Frenchman to his list of heroes, even as he praised the quick thinking and actions of the Americans, whom he said had prevented great bloodshed.
The Americans were "particularly courageous and showed great bravery in very difficult circumstances," Cazeneuve said Friday in Arras. He praised them for their cool-headedness and said that without it, "we could have faced a terrible drama."
Skarlatos' National Guard deployment in Afghanistan ended in July, and Stone is stationed in the Azores, according to Skarlatos' stepmother, Karen Skarlatos.
Sadler's father, Tony Sadler, said he received a call from his son after the events. "He leaves here a young man on an excursion to broaden his world view and to have fun with his buddies, and he comes back as France's national hero," Tony Sadler told Sacramento TV station KCR.
Stone's mother, Joyce Eskel, said her son called her from a hospital and told her the gunman had tried to shoot him twice but that the weapon didn't work.
"I'm just crying because I could've lost my son so easily," she told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Also injured in the train scuffle was French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, whose finger was cut to the bone when he activated the train's emergency alarm, he told Paris Match magazine.
Put on watch list
The suspected gunman was transferred Saturday morning to the French anti-terror police headquarters outside Paris and can be held there for up to 96 hours, officials said.
French officials said the suspect, who is of Moroccan origin, had lived in the southern Spanish city of Algeciras where he frequented a mosque that was under surveillance.
An official linked to Spain's anti-terrorism unit said El-Khazzani had lived in Spain until March 2014. He then moved to France, traveled to Syria and returned to France.
According to Spanish officials, the man lived for about a year in Algeciras -- a city that is a major transit port between Spain and Morocco. He was kept under surveillance by the Spanish police because of past criminal activities linked to drug trafficking. He left that city in March 2014, and Spanish police shared their information with French counterparts, according to a Spanish official.
A French official close to the investigation said the French alert heightened May 10 when El-Khazzani traveled to Berlin, planning to fly from there to Turkey.
On May 21, the French transmitted information to Spain, advising that he no longer lived in France but in Belgium. The French then advised Belgium, according to the official close to the investigation.
"We don't know if he went on to Syria," the official said.
French authorities are on heightened alert after Islamic extremist attacks at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January left 20 people dead, including the three gunmen.
In June, a lone attacker, who claimed allegiance to Islamic radicals, beheaded his employer and set off an explosion at an American-owned factory in France, raising concerns about other scattered, hard-to-predict attacks.
The Belgian federal prosecutor's office has opened an investigation because El-Khazzani boarded the train in Brussels, said spokesman Eric Van der Sypt. Also, Belgium has now announced that it will impose tighter security on trains.
The Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported that "if his identity is confirmed, this man would have been identified by the Belgian services as related to the terrorist networks recently dismantled in Belgium in the wake of the dismantling of Verviers network."
On Jan. 15, about a week after the Jan. 7 killings at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Belgian police killed two people and arrested a third person during a counterterrorism operation in Verviers, a town considered a hub for Islamist radicalization. Belgian authorities said then that the radicals singled out in the operation had been "about to launch terrorist attacks on a grand scale."
Information for this article was contributed by Elaine Ganley, Nadine Achoui-Lesage, Maggy Donaldson and staff members of The Associated Press; by Steven Erlanger and Raphael Minder of The New York Times; and by Michael Birnbaum and Peter Holley of The Washington Post.
A Section on 08/23/2015