How passengers overpowered France train terrorist

A heavily armed man who was overpowered on a train in France has now been identified as a 25-year-old Moroccan already known to the intelligence services, officials say.

He was restrained by passengers, including three Americans, two of whom are members of the United States armed forces.

They have been praised by the French and American presidents.

Mr Cazeneuve said on Saturday that the identity of the suspect had not been “established with certainty”, but official sources later said he had been identified through fingerprints.

The gunman was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle, an automatic pistol with ammunition magazines, and a box cutter knife, Mr Cazeneuve said.

One of the Americans, Spencer Stone, seized the gunman, while a second, Alek Skarlatos, grabbed his guns, according to accounts from the passengers.

A friend of theirs, Anthony Sadler, and Chris Norman, a British man who lives in France, also helped restrain the attacker.

Mr Norman told reporters on Saturday that he initially hid when he saw the gunman running down the aisle, before deciding that “perhaps the only chance was to act as a team”.

“He had a Kalashnikov – I don’t know how many magazines he had. My thought was: ‘I’m probably going to die anyway so, let’s go’,” he said.

“I jumped up and I was actually the fourth person to begin working on the terrorist.”

With Mr Stone holding the gunman in a headlock, the passengers hit him until he fell unconscious.

The gunman injured Mr Stone with a knife. Mr Stone and another man, who received cuts to his neck, were treated in hospital.

“I don’t know why [the gunman] could not fire, but I think it was because his gun was jammed,” said Mr Norman. “We were all enormously lucky.”

Chris Norman: “I’d rather die being active, trying to get him down, than simply sit in the corner and be shot”

Mr Stone and Mr Skarlatos are members of the US Air Force and the National Guard respectively.

Mr Stone has now been discharged from hospital and has joined his countrymen. They were all due to spend the evening at the United States embassy in Paris.

US President Barack Obama has telephoned the three men to commend their “extraordinary bravery”.

US Secretary of Defence Ash Carter praised the three, saying that the two servicemen had shown why “on duty and off, ours is the finest fighting force the world has ever known”.

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.

In an interview with Paris Match magazine, Mr Anglade said train staff had entered a private cabin and locked it when they heard gunshots, leaving the passengers alone.

“I thought it was the end, that we were going to die, that he was going to kill us all,” he said.

One member of staff found himself under fire and took five or six passengers with him into the baggage car, where he sounded the alarm, she said.

French President Francois Hollande telephoned Mr Obama on Saturday to thank him for the “exemplary conduct” shown by the three US citizens.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also praised their “extraordinary courage”.

The American men and Mr Norman were awarded medals for bravery by authorities in Arras.

Anti-terror investigators in Paris now have 96 hours to question the suspect.

The suspect boarded the Thalys train in Brussels, and Belgian prosecutors also opened an anti-terror investigation on Saturday morning.

France has been on edge since the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January, which left 17 people dead.

“I heard a gunshot,” Chris Norman, a British consultant who helps African entrepreneurs find financing in Europe, said at a news conference Saturday afternoon. “I heard a window shatter. I saw an employee run down the train. I saw a man holding an AK-47.”

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve of France identified the suspect Saturday as a 26-year-old Moroccan man known to the Spanish authorities as a member of “the radical Islamist movement.” Mr. Cazeneuve, however, cautioned that the French police had not fully confirmed his identity. French officials had identified the man as a security risk, but he was not under surveillance and had apparently spent little time in France.

By Saturday evening, having left the hospital in Lille where he was operated on after being severely cut by the suspect, Mr. Stone and his friends were being hailed as heroes by French officials and citizens. Some were proposing them for the Legion of Honor. President François Hollande of France had already invited them to Élysée Palace for a congratulatory meeting. The French passenger who initially encountered the attacker was also lauded by French officials for his bravery, but was not named.

There was no thought of heroism as the men sprang into action, however. “What happened and what we did, it just feels unreal,” Mr. Skarlatos said in the Skype interview. “It felt like a dream, or a movie.”

In the train carriage, Mr. Stone was the first to act, jumping up at the command of Mr. Skarlatos. He sprinted through the carriage toward the gunman, running “a good 10 meters to get to the guy,” Mr. Skarlatos said. Mr. Stone was unarmed; his target was visibly bristling with weapons.

With Mr. Skarlatos close behind, Mr. Stone grabbed the gunman’s neck, stunning him. But the gunman fought back furiously, slashing with his blade, slicing Mr. Stone in the neck and hand and nearly severing his thumb. Mr. Stone did not let go.

The gunman “pulled out a cutter, started cutting Spencer,” Mr. Norman, the British consultant, told television interviewers. “He cut Spencer behind the neck. He nearly cut his thumb off.”

Mr. Skarlatos grabbed the gunman’s Luger pistol and threw it to the side. Incongruously, the gunman yelled at the men to return it, even as Mr. Stone was choking him. A train conductor rushed up and grabbed the gunman’s left arm, Mr. Norman recalled.

The AK-47 had fallen to the gunman’s feet. Mr. Skarlatos picked it up and “started muzzle-thumping him in the head with it,” he said.

By then, an alarm had sounded on the train. Jean-Hugues Anglade, a well-known French actor, had broken the glass to set it off, cutting himself in the process. The train began to slow down. Julia Grunberg, a Brazilian student living in the Netherlands, looked up from her book. “It was all very normal,” she said. “Then, suddenly, the alarm started ringing. We were very fast; then we were very slow.”

Mr. Norman and Mr. Sadler had joined in the efforts to subdue the gunman, who “put up quite a bit of a fight,” Mr. Norman recalled at the news conference in Arras on Saturday. “My thought was, ‘I’m probably going to die anyway, so let’s go.’ Once you start moving, you’re not afraid anymore.”

Mr. Stone, wounded and bleeding, kept the suspect in a chokehold. “Spencer Stone is a very strong guy,” Mr. Norman said. The suspect passed out. Mr. Norman busied himself binding him up with a tie.

Mr. Skarlatos, the AK-47 in hand, began to patrol the carriages, looking for other gunmen. He made a series of startling discoveries: The suspect’s guns had malfunctioned, and he had not had the competence to fix them.

“He had pulled the trigger on the AK. The primer was just faulty, so the gun didn’t go off, luckily,” Mr. Skarlatos said. “And he didn’t know how to fix it, which is also very lucky.” In addition, the gunman had not been able to load his own handgun: “There was no magazine in it, so he either dropped it accidentally or didn’t load it properly, so he was only able to get what appeared to be one shot off,” Mr. Skarlatos said.

Bleeding heavily, Mr. Stone went to the aid of a gunshot victim, Mr. Sadler said. “Even though he was injured, he went to help the other man who was injured,” he said. “Without his help, he would have died.”

All those who took part realized it could have turned out far worse. “I mean, if that guy’s weapon had been functioning properly,” Mr. Skarlatos said, “I don’t even want to think about how it would have went.”

The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that if the suspect is who he says, he is a Moroccan citizen who had lived in Spain and Belgium, and according to Spanish officials, also lived in France and may have traveled to Syria from there. The Spanish authorities notified the French intelligence services in February 2014 that the man had joined “the radical Islamist movement,” Mr. Cazeneuve said. Spanish officials also notified Belgium.

The French then marked the man down as a security threat, assigning him an “S” profile, Mr. Cazeneuve said, intended to alert the border police. The man lived in Spain in 2014 and then this year in Belgium, Mr. Cazeneuve said.

According to Spanish officials, the man lived for about a year in Algeciras, a city in southern Spain that is a major transit port between Spain and Morocco, but left in March 2014. He had been kept under surveillance by the Spanish police during his time in Algeciras because of past criminal activities linked to drug trafficking; the Spanish police then shared that information with their French counterparts, according to a Spanish official involved in antiterrorism efforts who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Spanish officials told the newspaper El País that the suspect moved to France in 2014 and traveled from there to Syria before returning to France, details that Mr. Cazeneuve, a careful lawyer, did not mention in his statement.

Belgian authorities opened their own antiterrorism investigation on Saturday. 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 killings at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the Belgian police killed two people and arrested a third 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 were “about to launch terrorist attacks on a grand scale.”

But some officials and experts also recommended caution about the Thalys train episode, suggesting that the suspect was wrongly equipped to shoot up a narrow train and appeared to have been poorly trained as well, because his Kalashnikov jammed and his pistol was improperly loaded.

They also questioned the symbolic value of a train attack, compared with the carefully chosen symbolism of the attacks at Charlie Hebdo, which was denounced by many Muslims for its spoofing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, and at a kosher supermarket in Paris. Altogether, 17 people were killed.

“A Thalys train is not Charlie Hebdo,” said François Heisbourg, a defense and security analyst at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “And I don’t know what they taught him in Syria if he was ever there. You don’t want to use an assault rifle in a place you can barely turn around.”

Mr. Heisbourg suggested that if the train and its passengers had been the main target, stun grenades and pistols would have been more effective weapons. “It gives the impression that the man was acting on the spur of the moment, seeing a target of opportunity, perhaps,” he said. “My hunch is that he was bringing hardware from Belgium, gun running, and then maybe decided to do it on the train instead of shooting up Gare du Nord,” the end of the line in Paris.

But it is also possible, he said, that, like many foreigners trained by or attracted to Islamist radicalism and jihad, the man was told “to go home and do your worst, to act on initiative,” and perhaps told only where to pick up a gun.

The suspect in the train attack, like Mohammed Merah, who shot French Army personnel and Jews in Toulouse in 2012, or the Kouachi brothers who were instrumental in the Charlie Hebdo killings, were all on watch lists kept by French security services, which Mr. Heisbourg called “a recurring pattern that is very disturbing.” The good news is that the security services were following the right people, he said, but “the bad news is that this knowledge served little purpose.”

France has about 5,000 people on the “S” list, according to Agence France-Presse, but it is unclear how many are active or how the list may have grown over the years.

In 2014, France reorganized its intelligence and security services, creating the D.G.S.I. — General Directorate for Internal Security — largely separate from the police and the larger D.G.S.E. — General Directorate for External Security — to modernize its internal security and make it less of a police culture.

While the reorganization was needed, it may be too early to judge the results, Mr. Heisbourg said, and more resources are likely to be needed.

Belgium is known not only for its home-grown Islamist radicals but for being a distribution center for illegal arms for decades, for both criminal gangs and terrorist groups. The weapons used in the Charlie Hebdo killings, for instance, were traced to Belgium, where they could easily be moved to other countries within the European free-travel zone, particularly to neighbouring France, normally without any screening if being transported by train, bus or automobile.

Attacks like this one, combined with Europe’s difficulties this summer with a surge of migrants and asylum seekers from Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Libya and other countries, have made some officials question the open borders under the Schengen Agreement, which allows free movement without border controls across much of the European Union. Even the German interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, has suggested a new examination of that agreement because of the large flow of migrants to Germany and other northern countries from entry points in Greece, Italy and Hungary.