Mark Moogalian: Armenian professor at Sorbonne who tackled AK-47 assault rifle

Dispatch Times – Mark Moogalian, who lives in Paris but is originally from Midlothian, Virginia, in the United States, is the previously unnamed man who came to the aid of “Damien A”, 28, a French banker who confronted El-Khazzani.

A 51-year-old Sorbonne professor, Armenian-American Mark Moogalian, has been identified by the UK’s The Telegraph daily as the first passenger to tackle gunman Ayoub El-Khazzani on August 21 aboard the Amsterdam-Paris train.

One of the passengers who helped disarm a suspected gunman on a high-speed train has a connection to Chesterfield. He is now at a hospital in the intensive care unit. “But I look at my husband through the seats at an angle and he looked straight at me and said, ‘I’m hit!’ …”

Mr Hollande presented Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler and Briton Chris Norman with the Legion d’honneur at the Elysee Palace.

According to Sadler, the trio were initially sitting in a different carriage, but a bad wifi connection led them to get up and move to what became the scene of the attack.

Moogalian told his wife to “go” and then “rushed toward the gunman to remove… the Kalashnikov”, Risacher-Moogalian said.

“He kept pulling more weapons left and right”, Stone said, his arm in a sling from injuries suffered in the struggle. The attacker started jabbing at Stone with a box cutter and all three friends began punching and hitting him to subdue him.

“I’m impressed with them”.

“That gave me the impetus to get up and do it”, he said. “So human nature, we either fight or we flee and many of us our natural instinct was to dive under the tables and run away”.

“I am happy that no one got hurt”, he said. On Monday in Paris, the Americans received the French Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor.