Reuters
Paris, August 24: French President Francois Hollande Monday awarded France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur, to three U.S. citizens and a Briton who helped disarm a machine gun-toting suspected Islamist militant on a train last week. “Faced with the evil called terrorism there is a good, that’s humanity. You are the incarnation of that,” Hollande told the four men.
The suspect’s lawyer said on Sunday the man named by intelligence sources as Ayoub el Khazzani, 26, of Morocco, is “dumbfounded” they had him down as a suspected Islamist militant. Spencer Stone, a 23-year-old U.S. airman travelling with two friends on the train from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday, said on Sunday how he plugged the blood-spurting wound of another passenger with his fingers after himself being wounded by the attacker.
I just stuck two of my fingers in the hole, found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding stopped,” he said at a news conference alongside his friends, student Anthony Sadler, also 23, and National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, 22.
The man Stone helped, a Franco-American Hollande named as Mark Moogalian, remains hospitalized. U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley said he was “doing pretty well.” Chris Norman, a 62-year-old British consultant who lives in France, was also decorated by Hollande Monday. Stone said another man, who is French and whose name has not been disclosed, “deserves a lot of the credit” because he was the first one to try to stop the gunman.
