Train attack suspect ‘only meant to rob passengers’
Print Edition
The gunman who was disarmed by passengers on a train in France two days ago looked weak and malnourished and said he had only meant to rob people, a lawyer who interviewed him after the attack said yesterday.
“(I saw) somebody who was very sick, somebody very weakened physically, as if he suffered from malnutrition, very, very thin and very haggard,” the lawyer, Sophie David, told BFMTV.
David said the 26 year-old Moroccan expressed surprise when he was told that European authorities suspected him of being an Islamist militant.
“He is dumbfounded by the terrorist motives attributed to his action,” said David, who described him as her client. She said he was barefoot and wearing only a white hospital shirt and a boxer shorts at a police station in Arras, northern France, where the train stopped after the incident.
The man, named by French and Spanish sources close to the case as Ayoub el Khazzani, told David he found the Kalashnikov he was carrying in a park near the Gare du Midi rail station in Brussels where he was in the habit of sleeping.
“A few days later he decided to get on a train that some other homeless people told him would be full of wealthy people travelling from Amsterdam to Paris and he hoped to feed himself by armed robbery,” David said.
Two people were wounded in the struggle to subdue Khazzani aboard the high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday. Three Americans, one of whom suffered knife wounds, were among the passengers who stopped the gunman.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve did not name Khazzani, but said the man in custody had been “identified by the Spanish authorities to French intelligence services in February 2014 because of his connections to the radical Islamist movement.”
El Khazzani, a 25-year-old Moroccan national, is alleged to have on Friday evening boarded a high-speed train in Brussels bound for Paris armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, Luger automatic pistol, nine cartridge clips and a box-cutter.
Witnesses say he opened fire, injuring a man before being wrestled to the floor by three American passengers and tied up, until the train stopped in of Arras.
Intelligence services in several countries had nevertheless previously flagged him as a radical Islamist, and French investigators are focussing on an extremist attack.
(Agencies)
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