US train attack heroes return to Paris as Eastwood film opens
■ The 3 Americans had foiled Thalys train terror attack in France in ’ 15
Paris: The three Americans who foiled the Thalys train terror attack in France in 2015 have returned to Paris where the Clint Eastwood film about their heroics opened Wednesday.
Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, who play themselves in “The 15: 17 to Paris”, were reunited in a cinema in the French capital where emergency services crews who tended the injured after the attack were among the audience.
Some of them also play themselves in the drama which retells how the three childhood friends from California overpowered a Moroccan jihadist armed with an AK- 47 on the Paris- bound highspeed service from Amsterdam carrying more than 500 passengers.
“I hope you like the film. 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 of a pistol which jammed as El Khazzan tried to shoot him.
Stone was slashed with a bolt cutter around the neck as Skarlatos and Sadler knocked the attacker unconscious and then “hog- tied” him.
The three were hailed as heroes both in the United States and in France, where they were awarded the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest decoration.
“I reprised my role as a nurse,” said Nathalie Capron, who looked after the injured when the train pulled into Arras station in northern France.
Playing herself made it feel weirdly “less natural”, she told AFP after the preview screening for cast and crew in the French capital last week.
The film — which opens in cinemas in the US and the UK on Friday — follows the course of the friends’ lives, from their childhood struggles to the series of unlikely events leading up to the thwarted attack.
Hollywood legend Eastwood’s last two films — “Sully” and “American
Sniper” — were also about real- life heroes, but this is the first time he has used the real protagonists to play themselves.— AFP