France train attack was ‘premeditated’

The Moroccan man suspected of launching an attack on a high-speed train in France last week has been charged with attempted murder of a terrorist nature, a judicial source said.

Ayoub El Khazzani, 25, was remanded in custody, and also was charged with weapons offences and “participation in a terrorist association with a view to organising one or several damaging crimes,” according to the prosecutor’s submissions on Wednesday.

French prosecutors say there is a raft of evidence suggesting the man arrested for last week’s train attack carefully prepared a jihadist assault that would have ended in carnage had passengers not intervened.

Ayoub El Khazzani, a Moroccan national, boarded a high-speed train in Brussels on Friday armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and 270 rounds of ammunition, as well as a Luger pistol, a bottle of petrol and a box-cutter, said Paris prosecutor Francois Molins.

The 25-year-old walked out of a toilet cubicle armed and topless before being wrestled to the floor and subdued by two young American off-duty servicemen, their friend and a 62-year-old British consultant who have since been given France’s top honour, the Legion d’Honneur.

A Franco-American man was shot and injured in the attack, which Molins on Tuesday described as “targeted and premeditated”.

Khazzani’s claims to investigators that he was only planning to rob passengers were “barely credible”, said Molins, adding that Khazzani had grown increasingly evasive in his responses to police and stopped responding entirely on Monday.

Molins outlined a raft of evidence indicating why Khazzani was being probed for “attempted murder” as part of a terrorist plot.

This included the fact that Khazzani flew back in June from a town in southern Turkey – “a possible passageway into Syria” – and that he watched a video “calling for violent acts in the name of radical Islam” on his phone prior to launching the attack.

Molins also raised suspicions about how Khazzani was able to afford a 149 euro ($A241) first class train ticket, given his claims to be sleeping rough in Brussels.

Ticket sellers at the station have told investigators that Khazzani paid in cash and turned down an earlier journey where seats were available, which Molins said was an indication the target had been carefully chosen in advance.

He also dismissed as “absurd” claims by the suspect that he found the stash of weapons and mobile phone in a park where he was sleeping rough the night before.

And he said that Khazzani’s Facebook page had mysteriously been disabled on Saturday, the day after the foiled attack.

In footage caught by the iTele network, Khazzani was seen arriving at the Paris courthouse, where a magistrate will decide whether or not to charge him, flanked by policemen, barefoot, handcuffed and with a mask over his eyes.

France has been on high alert since three jihadist gunmen went on a killing spree in and near Paris in January, leaving 17 people dead.

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