- MARSEILLE, France: In a scene taken straight out of an American Wild West movie, masked men robbed a freight train in southern France Thursday night after blocking the railway tracks with shopping carts and metal beams.
The daring attack on the northern outskirts of the southern French city of Marseille saw a passenger train hurtling into the blockade forcing it, and a cargo locomotive behind it, to stop. "Attacks on trains aren't new, but it is a pretty rare phenomenon," David-Olivier Reverdy, a police official said.
"It's worthy of stagecoach attacks in the Wild West," he said. About 20 bandits looted several carriages and then vanished into the night. It was unclear what was taken.