French President François Hollande has awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, to three Americans and one British citizen on Monday for their role in thwarting an attack in a high-speed train traveling to Paris from Amsterdam on Friday. No one died. The three Americans, two of them servicemembers, tackled and disarmed the suspected gunman, a 26-year-old Moroccan man, Ayoub el-Khazzani, whom police say European authorities suspected of being an Islamist militant, although he was not being tracked. The lawyer for the suspected gunman says her client denies that the attack was motivated by terrorism, and that he was only a poor man intending to rob train travelers because he was hungry.

Sophie David: “I asked him whether he knows what he is being accused of. It is the first thing we do to see if they understand what their rights are. He replied, 'Yes.' But when I reminded him of why he was there, he was stunned by the terrorist nature which is being given to his actions.”