Travel chaos affects hundreds of thousands in ‘sabotage’-hit France
PARIS—French authorities say hundreds of thousands of train passengers will be affected by delays until Monday, following systematic sabotage on the rail network’s signal stations.
Traffic on France’s TGV high-speed trains gradually returned to normal on Saturday after engineers worked overnight repairing damaged signal stations and cables that caused travel chaos on Friday, the opening day of the Paris Olympic Games.
The SNCF rail company said the “massive attack” affected about 250,000 passengers on Friday.
Junior transport minister Patrice Vergriete said 800,000 could face the fallout until Monday when normal operations would resume, according to company estimates.
In Friday’s pre-dawn attacks on the high-speed rail network vandals damaged infrastructure along the lines connecting Paris with cities such as Lille in the north, Bordeaux in the west and Strasbourg in the east. Another attack on the Paris-Marseille line was foiled, SNCF said.
There has been no immediate claim of responsibility but two security sources said the modus operandi meant initial suspicions fell on leftist militants or environmental activists. They however said there was still no evidence to support the suspicion.
Still disrupted
“On the Eastern high-speed line, traffic resumed normally this morning (Saturday) at 6:30 a.m. while on the North, Brittany and South-West high-speed lines, 7 out of 10 trains on average will run with delays of 1 to 2 hours,” SNCF said in a statement on Saturday morning. ”
At this stage, traffic will remain disrupted on Sunday on the North axis and should improve on the Atlantic axis for weekend returns,” it added.
SNCF reiterated that transport plans for teams competing in the Olympics would be guaranteed.
Saboteurs struck France’s TGV high-speed train network in a series of pre-dawn attacks across the country, causing travel chaos and exposing security gaps ahead of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony later on Friday.
Coordinated
The coordinated sabotage took place as France mounted a massive security operation involving tens of thousands of police and soldiers to safeguard the capital for the sporting extravaganza, sucking in security resources from across the country.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said the probe would be overseen by its organized crime office, with the antiterrorist subdirectorate (SDAT), a branch of the judicial police that typically monitors hard-left, extreme-right and radical environmental groups, coordinating investigations.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal declined to speculate about the possibility of such groups being behind the sabotage.
“What we know, what we see, is that this operation was prepared, coordinated, that nerve centers were targeted, which shows a certain knowledge of the network to know where to strike,” he said.
The coordinated strikes on the rail network fed into a sense of apprehension ahead of Friday evening’s Olympics opening ceremony in the heart of Paris. Operations at the Basel-Mulhouse airport on France’s border with Switzerland were briefly suspended due to a bomb alert.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said he had full confidence in the French authorities. “I don’t have concerns,” he told reporters at the Olympic Village.
Spectators took their seats along the banks of the River Seine for the opening ceremony, with around 300,000 people expected to watch the athletes parade by on a flotilla of barges and riverboats, with billions tuning in on TV.
France has deployed 45,000 police, 10,000 soldiers and 2,000 private security agents to secure the ceremony, with snipers on rooftops, and drones in the air. But while the capital is locked down, security elsewhere in the country is lighter.
The attacks hit signaling installations on the Atlantic, Northern and Eastern high-speed lines with fires set off by explosive devices, the SNCF said.
Eurostar’s high-speed services linking London and Paris were forced onto slower lines while Germany’s Deutsche Bahn warned of disruption to long-distance services.
At the Gare de L’Est, Xavier Hiegel, 39, said he was trying to get home for the weekend and could not believe that people would want to harm the Olympics.
“The Games bring jobs so this really is nonsense. I hope the people responsible will be found and punished,” he said.
“This attack is not a coincidence, it’s an effort to destabilize France,” Valerie Pecresse, president of the Paris region, told reporters.
Paris 2024 said it was working closely with the SNCF to assess the situation. The attacks will make it tougher for people travelling to Paris for Olympic events.
