The day we stopped a terrorist
When a group of tourists brought down a man intent on mass murder on a train from Amsterdam to Paris they didn’t think life could get more surreal. Just more than two years on Clint Eastwood has made a film about that dramatic day in 2015 – and the touris
NOBODY gave him a second glance as he stood on the platform at Brussels-South station, waiting to board the 15.17 to Paris. On 21 August 2015 the sleek, high-speed train was particularly busy, with more than 500 passengers spread across its 12 carriages. Because it was a Friday afternoon many of them were businesspeople speeding home for the weekend. And because it was summer many were tourists who had been on the train since it had departed Amsterdam, or who’d boarded at Rotterdam or Antwerp.
But Ayoub el-Khazzani (25) wasn’t travelling on business. Nor was he a tourist. When he stepped onto the train in the Belgian capital he was carrying a bag containing the following items: a 9mm Luger semiautomatic pistol, a knife, a hammer, a bottle of petrol and an AK47 assault rifle with nine magazines of ammunition. He boarded that train to carry out a massacre.
Not long after crossing into France and with the train travelling at around 240km/h, Khazzani got up and entered the first-class toilet cubicle. He watched a YouTube clip on his phone, a video by jihadis inciting the faithful to take up arms in the name of the Prophet, before stripping to the waist. Then he strapped his backpack across his chest in order to make accessing his ammunition much easier.
Stepping out of the cubicle brandishing
his AK47 he immediately encountered two men. One was a 28-year-old French banker later identified, to preserve his anonymity, simply as “Damien A”. The other was Mark Moogalian (51), a professor, a lean, handsome man with dark tousled hair.
The two startled passengers tried to restrain Khazzani, and Moogalian grabbed the assault rifle, yanking and twisting it until it fell from the terrorist’s hands. But Khazzani just drew his pistol and shot Moogalian in the neck. “I’m hit,” he called to his wife, Isabella, who was by then crouching low behind her seat. “I’m hit.”
Panic erupted, a train guard ran past, but the assailant appeared unfazed, and picked up his rifle and walked back into the first-class coach, blocking the only exit. Khazzani had 270 rounds of ammunition and a carriage of unarmed, tightly bunched passengers to prey upon. Moogalian, lying prone and with blood spouting from his carotid artery, looked across at his wife and managed two more words: “It’s over.”
And it should have been. But it wasn’t. Not quite. Moogalian’s wife would later recall hearing a loud exclamation coming from further down the carriage – “F*** this shit” – and then seeing a man barrelling down the aisle, directly at Khazzani.
The man was young, but tall and broad, with close-cropped hair and a skyblue polo shirt. His name was Spencer Stone and he was a 23-year-old medic in the US Air Force. Running in a straight line and confined by the aisle, he couldn’t have presented an easier target.
Khazzani raised his assault rifle and took aim. “I knew this guy was going to kill everyone on board, so my thought process was that I’ve got to kill him or he’s going to kill me,” says Stone today, whose cheerful, matter-of-fact manner is, under the circumstances, nothing but endearing. “If I were to go back and talk to myself in that moment and say, ‘Hey, Spencer, do you think you’re going to make it over there?’ I’d say, ‘Absolutely not. I’m going to die right now. But at least I’m trying.’ ”
WHAT happened next was messy, a frenetic two minutes of blood, violence, confusion and dumb luck. “There were at least five things that, had they gone the other way at any given moment, would have meant a completely different outcome,” Stone says.
But before we focus on the struggle on which the lives of hundreds depended, we need to understand why Stone was there in the first place.
He was enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime European holiday with two childhood friends. He was with Alek Skarlatos (22) who’d grown up next-door in Sacramento, California, and who’d recently completed a tour of Afghanistan as a member of the National Guard. He was also with Anthony Sadler (23), a college student with no military experience whatsoever, save for the endless air-gun battles the three of them used to engage in as kids after school or at weekends.
Stone is 1,9m tall, square-jawed, jugeared and affable. Sadler is a lanky, sweet-looking pastor’s son who’s quick to laugh. Skarlatos is brawny – the ladies’ man of the three – with a stubble beard and sandy hair swept up in a quiff. Look at the photos they’d been posting to social media in the days and hours prior to the attack, and they seem the model of young American men abroad: big smiles, big shorts, curious about everything around them.
They revelled in the history of the places they’d visited and delighted in the novelty of drinking wine, which none of them had really tried before, or the thrill of finding a fried chicken joint in Berlin, which they’d never imagined possible. They were, in other words, having fun. After moving into the first-class carriage, Stone took a photo and posted it to Facebook with the caption, “First class, baby!”
“We didn’t expect this to happen,” says Skarlatos, who has a soft, deep voice and is the least animated of the three friends.
“We were going from a European
(From previous page) vacation to all of a sudden having to fight for our lives, like 0 to 100, out of the blue, no warning.” Stone grins, explaining, “We were just looking to party and have a good time.”
It was chance, though, that placed them in the same carriage as Khazzani. The friends had been enjoying their time in Amsterdam so much they almost decided to stay for another day before eventually resolving to head to Paris. Once on the train they settled into some standard-class table seats, despite having first-class tickets. They only moved into their allocated seats in an effort to find a better Wi-Fi signal. Stone and Skarlatos then decided to swop seats, so that the former was by the aisle and the latter was by the window.
If Stone had been in Amsterdam, or in standard class, or stuck in a first-class window seat, he wouldn’t been in the right place to spring up and charge at the gunman.
But he was in the right place. Just moments before he’d been asleep; the sound of the pistol shot followed by the train guard sprinting down the carriage woke him. The three friends turned around to see the shirtless Khazzani holding his AK47. “I was like, is this real?” Sadler would later recall. “Is somebody playing a joke?”
A heartbeat passes and then Skarlatos issues a command. “Spencer, go!” and his friend is up and out of his seat, racing towards the gunman like the high-school American football player he’d been not so long ago. Khazzani takes aim – he can’t miss – and pulls the trigger. Only . . . nothing.
He pulls the trigger a second time, and again the rifle fails to fire. It will later transpire that he had, for want of a better word, a duff bullet. It had a bad primer so it wouldn’t fire. “That happens maybe once every 2 000 times,” Skarlatos explains. “So just the odds of that alone . . .” he says, then trails off for a moment. “We were exceptionally lucky.”
Stone, to his own surprise as much as anybody’s, makes it to the gunman without being killed. He launches himself at Khazzani, who swings his rifle and opens up a gash on Stone’s head before the two men crash to the floor. Then the fight begins.
Back on their feet, they grapple, and Khazzani seems impossibly strong for someone so wiry. “He was smaller than me, but he was putting up a fight and was ready to die,” Stone says.
Stone, though, knows jiujitsu. He works himself behind his adversary and tries to get him into a choke hold but Khazzani is punching and struggling too hard to be subdued. Suddenly, Sadler and Skarlatos are there, the latter holding the AK47 to Khazzani’s head. “Stop, f***er!” he screams, but Khazzani doesn’t stop. “Shoot him!” cries Stone. “I’m trying!” replies his friend, who’s struggling to find an angle to allow him to shoot the terrorist without the bullet also striking Stone. Eventually, Skarlatos pulls the trigger. Click. Nothing.
It’s around this moment that the order of events becomes a little blurred. At some point Khazzani produces a knife, stabs Stone’s neck several times and almost severs his thumb. He grabs his Luger, aiming it point-blank at Stone’s head, only this time – click click – it’s the handgun that doesn’t fire. Skarlatos prises the pistol away and again tries to shoot Khazzani. Again, it won’t fire. During all this, Khazzani shouts, “Give me back my gun!” The whole thing was, Skarlatos admits, “very confusing”.
The way he summarises their deeds – which would see them all presented with the Légion d’honneur by French President François Hollande within 72 hours – there’s an almost slapstick element to the fight.
“We didn’t really know what we were doing,” Stone says. “But we were giving it a shot.”
He finally was able to choke Khazzani into unconsciousness, although Skarlatos hitting him in the head repeatedly with an AK47 probably helped. In the immediate aftermath the three men were aided by Chris Norman, a 62-year-old British man living in France, who helped keep Khazzani pinned before using his tie and some cable to bind the gunman’s arms and legs.
Meanwhile Stone used his fingers to plug the bleeding carotid artery in Mark Moogalian’s neck. Skarlatos took the AK47 and made sure the train was clear of any other terrorists, discovered the duff bullet and realised the pistol’s magazine had fallen out, which is why it wouldn’t shoot. Sadler filmed everything on his phone: the bound terrorist, his bleeding friend, the ammo.
The train was still moving but everything, they remember, was so tranquil as to be surreal. “It was strangely quiet,” Skarlatos says. Before they finally pulled into Arras, where the train had been rerouted, Sadler and Skarlatos found themselves standing beside one another just laughing at the absurdity of what had happened to them.
“We were exceptionally lucky,” Skarlatos says. “Because the odds of being in a terrorist attack, then the odds of surviving a terrorist attack, then the odds of being the ones who stopped it and then the odds of those bullets not going off? It’s astronomical. We definitely shouldn’t be alive.”
Instantly they were heroes, an experience that turned out to be no less surreal than the attack itself. While Stone underwent surgery on his thumb, Sadler and Skarlatos had a conference call with American President Barack Obama. “We were being debriefed by government officials and we’re told that the president is going to call,” Sadler says. “Like . . . what? We’re on speaker and we hear this voice saying, ‘Hey, Alek and Anthony!’ And even then you look around the room and think, ‘Wait . . . who . . . me?’ ”
‘We were just three ordinary guys who got put in a crazy situation’
THEY arrived in Paris by motorcade, speeding straight to the US ambassador’s residence where 10 hot Pizza Hut boxes were stacked and waiting and their fabulous rooms came stocked with magnums of champagne. “We get robes!” Skarlatos beamed. He and Sadler jumped up and down on the beds while Stone Facetimed his sister.
There were medals – French medals, Belgian medals – and accolades and a military promotion for Stone. There was a face-to-face meeting with Obama in the Oval Office, where they were presented with more medals.
They became celebrities. They had dinner with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sadler appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; Stone was on Jimmy Kimmel Live!; Skarlatos took part in Dancing with the Stars and did well.
“I actually made it to the final,” Skarlatos says. “I came third. I don’t know if that’s because I’m such a good dancer or because people had sympathy for me. But it was a blast.”
In a way, they say, the surrealism of their celebrity was a good thing. “By being busy it really helped us get over what had happened, because we were having to talk about it a lot in interviews,” Skarlatos says.
This didn’t mean there was no psychological fallout. Sadler says that after the attacks in Paris less than three months later, he found himself receiving text messages from people saying they could have used him in the French capital. He convinced himself that, somehow, the attacks, which left 130 people dead, were in revenge for the massacre they’d thwarted.
He believed they’d used up all their allotted luck on the train and events only seemed to confirm this: in October, Stone was stabbed during a night out in Sacramento. A group of men had been harassing some of his female friends, there was an altercation and he was stabbed in the back. He had to undergo life-saving open-heart surgery.
The week prior to that there was a mass shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon where Skarlatos was a student. Nine people were killed. Skarlatos, had he not been in rehearsals for Dancing with the Stars, would have been on campus. Tragedy seemed to be just half a step behind them. “It felt like a dark cloud falling on us,” Sadler says. “We had to lean on each other. Lean on our friendship.”
The cloud eventually cleared. But their lives didn’t go back to any kind of normality. In fact, what happened next was probably the oddest episode yet. They produced a compelling book about their experiences – The 15:17 to Paris – which was optioned as a film. Clint Eastwood was brought in as director. “He kept flying us out to Los Angeles to have meetings, to get our points of view,” says Sadler.
But one day, they had a meeting that was different.
“He’d been talking about auditioning actors and we were kind of thinking that we might be meeting the guys who were going to play us,” Sadler recalls. “During the conversation he said he wanted us to act out what we did on the train for the cameras. We said, ‘Okay, yeah, that’s fine. We’ll act it out for the actors so that they can see what we did.’ Then he said, ‘Why don’t you guys just play yourselves?’ ”
“It was a total surprise to us,” Stone says. “It was sprung on us last minute.”
It’s hard to think of a greater casting gamble but there was a good reason for the decision. “No one else could have gotten the dynamic that the three of us have,” Stone says. “With some actors, I would’ve just said, ‘That’s not me.’ ” He smiles. “It was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Not many people get to star in a Clint Eastwood film about themselves.”
Writing the book and starring in the film were also, they all agree, cathartic processes. Eastwood cast other real-life passengers as themselves, and returning to a mocked-up train carriage with them all was just another surreal moment in a catalogue of surreal moments. But it was, says Skarlatos, instructive, too. “We were able to find out so much about what actually happened. About what the other passengers were doing.
“We found out that the bullet that shot Mark in the neck exited his body and flew between my and Spencer’s heads. If we were just involved in a terrorist attack but then didn’t do a book or a movie, we’d probably be in the dark about a lot of the details.”
All of them want the film to show just how normal they are. In the aftermath, there was an assumption that they must have all been Marines, battle-scared action men. But they weren’t. “I’m a medic in the Air Force,” Stone says. “I’d been working in a paediatric unit for three years. I’m just a regular guy.”
Skarlatos had been to Afghanistan but as a national guardsman had not been on the front line or seen combat. Nor had he ever pretended to. Sadler emphasises this.
“The other two were being portrayed as these GI Joes who’d seen a whole bunch of war. But we were just three ordinary guys who got put in a crazy situation.
“I think about it every day,” Skarlatos says. “We got really lucky.” The 15.17 to Paris opens in South African cinemas on 9 March.