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 The award came a day after it was revealed that one of the
Americans, Spencer Stone, also appeared to have saved the life of a
fellow passenger.
"Faced with the evil called terrorism there is a good, that's
humanity. You are the incarnation of that," he told the four men.
The suspect's lawyer said on Sunday the man named by intelligence
sources as Ayoub el Khazzani, 26, of Morocco, is "dumbfounded" at
having been taken for an Islamist militant and says he only intended
to rob people on board because he was hungry, his lawyer said on
Sunday.
Stone, a 23-year-old airman traveling with two friends on the train
from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday, told reporters on Sunday of how
he plugged the blood-spurting wound of another passenger with his
fingers after himself being injured by the attacker, identified by
security sources as a suspected Islamist militant.
"I went over, saw that he was squirting blood out of the left or
right side of his neck," Stone, with a cut above his right eye and
his left arm in a sling to protect his injured hand, said at a press
conference alongside his friends, student Anthony Sadler, also 23,
and National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, 22.
"And I was going to use my shirt at first, but I realized that
wasn't going to work, so I just stuck two of my fingers in the hole,
found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding
stopped." Stone held that position until paramedics arrived, he
said.
The man whom Stone helped remains hospitalized. U.S. Ambassador to
France Jane Hartley said at the news conference that he was "doing
pretty well."
Chris Norman, a 62-year-old British consultant who lives in France,
was also decorated by Hollande on Monday.
Stone said another man, who is French and whose name has not been
disclosed, "deserves a lot of the credit" because he was the first
one to try to stop the gunman.
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Stone thanked the doctors who reattached his thumb, which was almost
severed by the gunman, who was armed with a box cutter, a pistol and
a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle.
The three Americans, who grew up together near Sacramento,
California, were touring Europe, partly to celebrate Skarlatos'
return from a recent tour of duty in Afghanistan.
The trio said they had no choice but to react when they saw the
gunman cocking his assault rifle. Stone said he choked him while
Skarlatos hit him on the head with one of his firearms.
Stone's and Skarlatos' military training kicked in while they
provided first aid and searched the train to make sure there were no
other gunmen, they said.
They said the gunman was apparently untrained in firearms and that
he could have used all his firepower to devastating effect if he had
known more about weapons.
Skarlatos disputed a statement the gunman made, through a lawyer,
that he just wanted to rob the train because he was hungry.
"It doesn't take eight magazines to rob a train," Skarlatos said.
"The guy had a lot of ammo. His intentions seemed pretty clear."
(Additional reporting and writing by Fiona Ortiz in Chicago and
Andrew Callus in Paris; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Paul Simao)
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