French high-speed train network hit by 'sabotage' on eve of Paris Olympics

FE Team | Published: July 27, 2024 00:15:24

PARIS, July 26 (Reuters): Saboteurs struck France's TGV high-speed train network in a series of pre-dawn attacks that caused chaos on the country's busiest rail lines and heightened security concerns ahead of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony in Paris later on Friday.
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.
SNCF, the state-owned railway operator, said vandals had damaged signal boxes 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.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Two security sources said the modus operandi meant initial suspicions fell on leftist militants or environmental activists, but they said there was not yet any evidence.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal declined to speculate when asked in a TV interview about the possibility of such groups being behind the sabotage.
"The investigation is starting, I call on everyone to be cautious," he said. "What we know, what we see, is that this operation was prepared, coordinated, that nerve centres were targeted, which shows a certain knowledge of the network to know where to strike."
In another incident, police said the Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport, located by the French-Swiss-German border, was evacuated due to a bomb threat. It later reopened and resumed operations, the airport said.
The coordinated strikes on the rail network will feed into a sense of apprehension ahead of the Olympics opening ceremony in the heart of Paris later on Friday.
More than 300,000 spectators are expected to line the banks of the River Seine when the athletes parade through the heart of Paris on a flotilla of barges and riverboats, part of an extravagant opening ceremony that will be watched by a global audience.
France is deploying 45,000 police, 10,000 soldiers and 2,000 private security agents to secure the Games' opening ceremony. Snipers will be on rooftops and drones keeping watch from the air.
But while the capital is locked down for the opening ceremony, security elsewhere in the country is lighter.
The TGV high-speed rail attacks left hundreds of thousands of people stranded at stations.
The SNCF urged all travelers to postpone their journeys. Repairs were underway but traffic would be severely disrupted until at least the end of the weekend. Trains were being sent back to their points of departure.
At the Gare de L'Est, Xavier Hiegel, 39, said he was just trying to get home for the weekend and could not believe that people would want to harm the Olympics.