Film on heroes of terror train opens

The three Americans who foiled the Thalys train terror attack in France in 2015 have returned to Paris where the film about their heroics opened on Wednesday.

Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, pictured with director/producer Clint Eastwood, who play themselves in The 15:17 to Paris, were reunited in a cinema where emergency services crews who tended the injured after the attack were in the audience.

Some also play themselves in the drama which tells how the three childhood friends from California overpowered a Moroccan jihadist armed with an AK-47 on the Paris-bound high-speed train from Amsterdam carrying more than 500 passengers.

“We wanted to be exact about what happened,” said Skarlatos, 25, an Oregon National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan.

US Air Force Airman Spencer Stone charged at Ayoub El Khazzan after he wounded another passenger and managed to disarm him of the AK-47 and a pistol which jammed as El Khazzan was about to shoot him. Stone’s neck was slashed with a bolt cutter as Skarlatos and Sadler knocked the attacker unconscious and hog-tied him.

The three were hailed as heroes in the US and France, where they were awarded the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest decoration.

Eastwood, arriving for Monday’s world premiere of the film in Burbank, California, said he wanted with the film to “make people aware that they have the strength to do [extraordinary] things”.

The film, which opens in cinemas in the US and the UK today, follows the course of the friends’ lives, from their childhood struggles to the series of unlikely events leading up to the thwarted attack. Eastwood said: “There could have been a lot of people killed, [the attacker] had a lot of ammunition and a very reliable gun.”

If his young stars hadn’t acted it could have been a slaughter, he said. –