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US Soldier: How We Stopped Train Gunman
An American soldier has told how he helped overpower a gunman who opened fire on a train from Amsterdam to Paris.
Alek Skarlatos, 22, was on a European holiday with two of his childhood friends, Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler, when they heard gunshots on the train.
When the gunman burst into their carriage, Mr Skarlatos and Mr Spencer, who is in the Air Force, charged at him.
"I just yelled 'Let's go!'," Mr Skarlatos told Sky News from his hotel from in Arras, northern France.
"Spencer got to the guy first, grabbed the guy by the neck and I grabbed the handgun, got the handgun away from the guy and threw it.
"Then I grabbed the AK, which was at his feet and started muzzle thumping him in the head with it."
As Mr Stone was wrestling the gun off the suspect, he was badly cut by the suspect, who had a box cutter knife.
Mr Stone needs surgery on his badly wounded hand, but his friends say he is "doing fine". Two other people were also wounded in the attack.
After the suspect was restrained, Mr Skarlatos - who only recently returned from Afghanistan - began disarming the gunman's pile of weapons and realised the AK47 had jammed.
"He didn't know how to fix it, which is very lucky," he said.
"If that guy's weapon had been functioning properly I don't even want to think about how it would have went.
"Spencer would have been dead for sure, because he was the first one up.
"We were incredibly lucky."
Mr Skarlatos and Mr Sadler said their "heroic" friend also saved the life of another passenger, whose throat was cut.
"In the aftermath, we saw that a man's throat had been split and he was bleeding profusely," Mr Sadler said.
"Spencer, who has some paramedics training, just clogged up his neck so he wouldn't die. This is all in the midst of Spencer bleeding profusely himself.
"It was just really heroic of him to do something like that."
He added: "I just applaud my friends for being on point.
"If Alek didn't yell 'Go!' and Spencer didn't get up straight away who knows how many people he would have shot."
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