An attacker with an assault rifle hurt three people on a train bound for Paris. The gunman was overpowered by passengers and arrested on Friday after the train stopped in northern France.
In a news conference in Paris on Saturday, the French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the gunman may be a suspected Islamist militant, but this is not confirmed yet.
""If the identity that he gives is confirmed, it would correspond to the identity of a person of Moroccan nationality, aged 26, brought to attention by the Spanish authorities to the French intelligence services on February 2014, because he belonged to an extremist Islamic movement."
The minister added that a preliminary investigation shows the attacker had a Kalashnikov assault rifle, an automatic pistol with accompanying ammunition clips and a box cutter knife.
The incident began when a French passenger ran into the heavily armed suspect while trying to enter a bathroom and the gunman fired a weapon.
Two U.S. servicemen were among the passengers who stopped the gunman.
Alek Skarlatos, a member of the U.S. National Guard, says his friend Spencer Stone, who suffered knife wounds, played a crucial role in tackling the attacker.
"Spencer ran a good ten meters to get to the guy and we didn't know that his gun not working or anything like that, Spencer just ran anyway and if anybody would have gotten shot it would have been Spencer for sure and we're very lucky that nobody got killed, especially Spencer."
At the same time, a British passenger also helped subdue the attacker.
The man Chris Norman says this was his motivation.
""I think it was actually very rapid reasoning, if you like, because he had a Kalashnikov, he had a magazine full…. I don't know how many magazines he had and my thought was, ok, I'm probably going to die anyway, so let's go. I'd rather die being active, trying to get him down, than simply sit in the corner and be shot."
Norman says he has never been trained to confront armed men; and he realized it was a possible terror attack when he saw the gunman taking an AK-47.
The other injured reportedly include French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade and a French-American traveler.
Currently, the French anti-terrorism prosecutor is investigating the incident. But the gunman's exact motives are still unknown at this point.
A Spanish counter-terrorism source reveals that the suspect had travelled to Syria and later returned to France.
Further investigations are underway.
For CRI, I'm Luo Wen.
