France to honor Americans, Briton who disarmed train gunman
By Elizabeth Pineau PARIS (Reuters) - French President Francois Hollande on Monday will award France's highest honor, the Legion d'honneur, to three U.S. citizens and a Briton who helped disarm a machine gun-toting attacker on a train last week. The award will be made when Hollande meets the men in the morning, a member of the president's entourage said after it was revealed that one of the Americans, Spencer Stone, likely also had saved the life of a fellow passenger. Stone, a 23-year-old airman traveling with two friends on the train from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday, told reporters on Sunday of how he plugged the blood-spurting wound of another passenger with his fingers after himself being injured by the attacker, identified by security sources as a suspected Islamist militant. "I went over, saw that he was squirting blood out of the left or right side of his neck," Stone, with a cut above his right eye and his left arm in a sling to protect his injured hand, said at a press conference alongside his friends, student Anthony Sadler, also 23, and National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, 22. "And I was going to use my shirt at first, but I realized that wasn't going to work, so I just stuck two of my fingers in the hole, found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding stopped." Stone held that position until paramedics arrived, he said. The man whom Stone helped remains hospitalized. U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley said at the news conference that he was "doing pretty well." Chris Norman, a 62-year-old British consultant who lives in France, also will be decorated by Hollande on 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, whom authorities have identified as Ayoub el Khazzani, 26, of Morocco. Stone thanked the doctors who reattached his thumb, which was almost severed by the gunman, who was armed with a box cutter, a pistol and a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. The three Americans, who grew up together near Sacramento, California, were touring Europe, partly to celebrate Skarlatos' return from a recent tour of duty in Afghanistan. The trio said they had no choice but to react when they saw the gunman cocking his assault rifle. Stone said he choked him while Skarlatos hit him on the head with one of his firearms. Stone's and Skarlatos' military training kicked in while they provided first aid and searched the train to make sure there were no other gunmen, they said. They said the gunman was apparently untrained in firearms and that he could have used all his firepower to devastating effect if he had known more about weapons. Skarlatos disputed a statement the gunman made, through a lawyer, that he just wanted to rob the train because he was hungry. "It doesn't take eight magazines to rob a train," Skarlatos said. "The guy had a lot of ammo. His intentions seemed pretty clear." (Additional reporting and writing by Fiona Ortiz in Chicago and Andrew Callus in Paris; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Paul Simao)
