A trial has begun in a terrorism case stemming from the 2015 incident on a high-speed train in France that ended when a pair of U.S. military men helped overpowered a would-be attacker.
The trial is expected to feature three Americans who, along with a French passenger, subdued Moroccan national Ayoub El Khazzani on the Amsterdam-Paris Thalys train in August of 2015. The Americans — then-off duty Air Force Staff Sgt. Spencer Stone, then-Army National Guard soldier Alex Skarlatos, and friend Anthony Sadler — subsequently played themselves in the Clint Eastwood-directed movie, The 15:17 to Paris. Eastwood also has been called as an expert witness.
“His film … involved accurate, the court believes, reenactments of what exactly took place that day,” France24’s Catherine Norris-Trent reported from the courthouse in Paris. Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler, she added, “feel it’s important to tell their story and they also want to look the would-be attacker in the eye and hear answers directly from him.”
The trial focuses not only on El Khazzani but also on three alleged co-conspirators. El Khazzani has said that he was encouraged to attempt the attack by Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who organized the Paris attacks of November 2015, including the massacre at the Bataclan concert venue.
“He told me the best way of carrying out my mission was to use explosives,” El Khazzani said at an earlier hearing. “But I said I preferred a Kalashnikov.”
Ultimately, one passenger was wounded after encountering El Khazzani after he came out of a train bathroom. Stone and the attacker were also injured in the confrontation.
“He clearly had no firearms training whatsoever,” Skarlatos said after the incident. “If he knew what he was doing, or even just got lucky … We would have all been in trouble and probably wouldn’t be here today — along with a lot of other people.”
