France suspects far-left groups were behind rail sabotage, minister says
France suspects members of far-left groups were behind the sabotage of the high-speed rail network last week just as the Olympic Games were about to begin, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Monday.
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Saboteurs struck the network on Friday
with pre-dawn attacks on signal substations and cables at critical
points, causing travel chaos hours before the opening ceremony in Paris.
"We
have identified the profiles of several people," Darmanin told France 2
TV, adding that the sabotage bore the hallmarks of far-left groups.
The Paris prosecutors office, whose organised crime branch is leading the investigation, said no arrests had been made so far.
A police source involved in the probe said it was "too soon to tell" if there was a link with acts of vandalism overnight that targeted the country's telecommunications network.
Isolated
communications outages affected some mobile, fixed phone and internet
services on Monday due to the vandalism, junior minister for digital
matters Marina Ferrari said on X.
In
recent years, France has mainly been targeted in attacks by Islamist
militants, but security services have been increasingly concerned about
far-left or anarchist groups, which typically oppose the state and
capitalism.
The
then-head of France's domestic intelligence agency, Nicolas Lerner,
told Le Monde newspaper last year President Emmanuel Macron's divisive
2023 pension shake-up had helped lure recruits to far-left groups, which
have increasingly added environmental issues to their ideologies.
"In
recent years, the far-left movements have been known for particularly
violent clandestine actions, including arson campaigns ... ransacking
and destruction of property," Lerner, who now leads the foreign spy
agency, said in the interview.
In
a 2023 report on terrorism trends, European police agency Europol said
left-wing and anarchist groups typically attacked "critical
infrastructure, such as repeaters and antennas, government institutions
and private companies" with their "most common modus operandi" being
arson and explosive devices.
Train
services in France were back up and running by early Monday after teams
worked around the clock at the weekend to fix the damage, Transport
Minister Patrice Vergriete told RTL radio.
He
said 800,000 people had faced travel disruptions and said the cost to
the state-owned rail operator SNCF would be considerable.
