PARIS
French President Francois Hollande has honored on Monday three Americans and a Briton for their bravery, after they foiled an attack in a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday.
Hollande awarded the four men the country's Legion d'Honneur medal in a ceremony at the Elysee palace in the presence of Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel and the U.S. ambassador to Paris Jane Hartley.
"You averted what could have been a true carnage. Your heroism should be an example and a source of inspiration for everyone. You behaved like soldiers but also as men, responsible men," Hollande said.
Hollande also thanked a 28-year-old French banker who was the first to tackle the gunman but "does not want his name to be made public".
On Friday, a gunman, identified by French authorities as a Moroccan national, Ayoub el-Khazzani, 25, has boarded the train in Brussels.
Once the train has crossed the Belgian border into northern France, a French banker encountered el-Khazzani as he was walking out from the toilet with a Kalashnikov in his hand.
According to the French leader, the French passenger tried to disarm him but he got away and fired at least one shot, wounding a French-American passenger in his fifties, who is still in a hospital.
That is when the two off-duty U.S. servicemen Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos and their friend Anthony Sadler, a student, overpowered the gunman and managed to restrain him.
"Robbery not terrorist attack"
Investigators said they seized a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a Luger automatic pistol, nine cartridge clips and a box-cutter.
Meanwhile, the suspect -- who had been flagged by intelligence services in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain as an "Islamist extremist" -- has told investigators he was "dumbfounded" by accusations he was intending to carry out a terror attack, and insists he merely stumbled upon a weapons stash in a park in Belgium and decided to use it to rob passengers.
"[I saw] somebody who was very sick, somebody very weakened physically, as if he suffered from malnutrition, very, very thin and very haggard," Sophie David, a lawyer assigned to his case when he was taken off the train in Arras, in northern France, told French broadcast BFM-TV on Sunday.
"He is dumbfounded that his act is being linked to terrorism," David added.
According to Spanish intelligence services el-Khazzani went to France, from where he travelled to Syria in 2014.
However, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Spanish intelligence services had tipped off France over his ties to "radical Islamist movements", but it is unclear whether he lived in France at any time after leaving Spain.
Mohamed el-Khazzani, the father of the suspect told The Telegraph said his son was a "good boy, very hardworking" who "never talked politics; just football and fishing."
El-Khazzani, from Tetouan, northern Morocco, said he brought his entire family to Spain in 2007, first settling in Madrid before moving to Algeciras.
He said that his son was arrested twice in the Spanish capital for selling cannabis in 2009.
El Khazzani said he has not spoken to his son for over a year, but he believed he was in France and Belgium after he lost his job with a telephone company in France.
Under French law, suspects in terrorism-related investigations can be questioned for up to 96 hours, meaning el-Khazzani could be held until Tuesday evening.
