A Moroccan man who shot a passenger and was overpowered on a Brussels-Paris express train told French investigators that he had been intent only on armed robbery but police described him as an itinerant Jihadi militant who may have trained in Syria.
Ayoub al Khazzani, who turns 26 next week, was described by his court-appointed lawyer as a bewildered, under-fed man who claimed to have found a Kalashnikov rifle, nine loaded magazines and a Luger pistol in a bag while sleeping rough near Brussels-Midi railway terminus.
“I saw somebody who was very sick, somebody very weakened physically, as if he suffered from malnutrition, very, very thin and very haggard,” said Sophie David. “He is dumbfounded by the terrorist motives attributed to his action,” she added.
Khazzani, who is accused of shooting a Franco-American passenger in the back and wounding Spencer Stone, a US air force soldier, with a box cutter, also insisted that his Kalashnikov had jammed without firing a shot.
A 28-year-old French bank employee who was the first to confront Al Khazzani said that he wrestled with him when he emerged from a lavatory on the south-bound Thalys express on Friday evening minutes after it left Belgium.
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Khazzani was shirtless and carrying the handgun and assault rifle, the man, identified only as Damien A, told le Journal du Dimanche newspaper. Other reports said that Khazzani, who speaks no French, had told police through an interpreter, that he had taken drugs to calm his nerves.
Officials in France, Spain and Belgium described Khazzani, who was subdued by three young Americans and a 62-year-old Briton, as a Jihadist suspect who had been radicalised while in prison in Spain for drug offences and featured on watch lists as he moved around Europe over the past five years.
President Hollande has called five US, French and British saviours from the Thalys to the Elysée Palace tomorrow to thank them for thwarting the blood-bath that would have ensued had Khazzani started firing his weapons inside the crowded train. The incident was the fifth violent Jihadist attack in France since two gunmen killed 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris on January 8.
Politicians and media in the United States and Europe praised the courage of Mr Stone, 23, who was released from hospital on Saturday, and Alek Skarlatos, 22, and Anthony Sadler, 23 his companions, along with Chris Norman, a French-resident consultant.
Bernard Cazeneuve, the Interior Minister, stressed that the Frenchman Damien A, who has requested anonymity, had been the first to take action against Khazzani. “The French passenger courageously tried to tackle him before the attacker fired several shots,” said Mr Cazeneuve.
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The passenger who was wounded by one of the pistol shorts, described as a “Franco-American”, was in a stable condition in a northern France hospital with a punctured lung and broken ribs but no damage to vital organs.
French railway chiefs denied claims by Jean-Luc Anglade, a film actor who was in the adjoining carriage, that some Thalys personnel had run away and locked themselves into a protected compartment during the shooting. Mr Anglade stuck by his version, saying: “I saw what happened very clearly. The personnel locked themselves in and left us helpless,” he said.
Police assumed that accomplices had assisted in the attack by Khazzani, who was being questioned at the anti-terrorist police headquarters in northern Paris. Police are working with Belgian and other police to trace his weapons.
Khazzani, from Tetouan, near the Strait of Gibraltar, had worked in odd jobs and been involved in drug trafficking around Algeciras in Spain, where he was arrested in May and December in 2009 and then in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in North Africa, in 2012. That year, the Commiseria General de Información, the Spanish Special Branch, circulated his name in Europe as a religious extremist. He crossed into France in 2014 but the French did not spot him.
The Spanish believe that he may have travelled immediately on to Syria, where some 1,500 Moroccans have been active with the Islamic state movement. He was traced to Belgium last year and linked to Islamist extremists who were arrested in raids in the eastern town of Verviers in January. Two militants were shot dead in the police assault. In May this year, Khazzani was spotted at Berlin airport taking a flight to Turkey, French police said. It was not clear whether he had made the trip.
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Despite a big increase in resources, French anti-terrorist services say that they are unable to keep track of all 3,000 people who are listed as Jihadist security risks. The Khazzani assault matched the series of incidents in France, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe in recent years in which locally-resident militants have waged violence in the name of radical Islam with logistical and encouragement if not specific orders from networks in the Middle East. Twenty people have been murdered in the name of Jihad so far this year in France, including 18 in the January week that began with the Charlie Hebdo assault.