France’s national high-speed rail network was hit by “sabotage” on Friday that disrupted travel for tens of thousands of passengers. The malicious strikes came as travelers were expected to descend on the capital ahead of the start of the Paris Olympics.
A source close to the investigation told AFP the coordinated acts of “sabotage” were deliberate and targeted, adding many routes would be cancelled, with the national train operator SNCF adding the attacks affected its Atlantic, northern and eastern lines.
“Arson attacks were started to damage our facilities,” the SNCF said, noting traffic on the affected lines was “heavily disrupted” and the situation would last through the weekend as repairs are conducted.
Passengers wait for their train departures at the Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris on July 26, 2024 as France’s high-speed rail network was hit by malicious acts disrupting the transport system hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. (THIBAUD MORITZ/AFP via Getty)
SNCF chief executive Jean-Pierre Farandou said 800,000 passengers were affected while Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete called the attacks an “outrageous criminal act” that would have “very serious consequences” for rail traffic throughout the weekend.
He said connections towards northern, eastern and northwestern France would be halved.
SNCF said trains were being diverted to different tracks “but we will have to cancel a large number of them”.
The southeastern line was not affected as “a malicious act was foiled.”
SNCF urged passengers to postpone their trips and stay away from train stations, the AFP report notes.
The attacks were launched as Paris was under heavy security ahead of the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, with 300,000 spectators and an audience of VIPs expected at the event.
The parade on Friday evening will see up to 7,500 competitors travel down a six-kilometre (four-mile) stretch of the river Seine on a flotilla of 85 boats.
While much attention is focussed on cyberattacks, physical sabotage of the infrastructure underpinning modern life remains a serious issue and attacks like this are common, if little heeded.
As reported by Breitbart News in 2022 at the time of similar sabotage in Germany, when a coordinated cutting of communication cables across the country brought the national railway network grinding to a halt, there is a long history of political attacks on infrastructure:
Breitbart has reported on many such instances of the hard-left attacking the basic infrastructure which does the heavy lifting for 21st century life, and railways are not an uncommon target. High-speed trains were sabotaged in Italy in 2019 by arson inside a power substation in a case, it was noted, that coincided with the court judgement on another group of left-wing extremists who were being sentenced for their role in a book shop bombing.
Although harder work and considerably more likely to cause loss of life, train derailments by the hard left have also been witnessed in recent years in Canada, with environmentalists protesting an oil pipeline by sabotaging trains carrying oil. In one case, a derailed oil train was engulfed in flames and 1.5 million litres of oil were spilt.
Data infrastructure including telephone exchanges and fibre optical cables, and supply power are also known. In 2019, a radio station and radio transmitter were burnt down in France. In 2020, 50,000 people lost internet access in the greater Paris region after telephone and data cables were cut, the culmination of a weeks-long campaign of such sabotage against information infrastructure. It was suspected the “ultra-left” could have been responsible.
In 2021, a series of apparently connected attacks were directed at telephone and internet services in France, with sabotage on several nights seeing data company work vans burnt out, fibre optic cables destroyed, and a communications tower destroyed. Left-wing actors took credit for the acts, saying in a statement: “it is not to protest against 5G in particular but in a broader context, fighting against the techno-world… We want to salute all the arsonists who are acting in the shadows at the moment and repeatedly beating this technological hell.”
There has been more of the same seen this year. In early April, the far-left was suspected in the major sabotage of a power station and nine power lines on two consecutive nights which left thousands of homes and a semiconductor factory without power. Just days later, several French cities were left totally without internet after major data cables in several different locations were cut in the same night. It was said of the timer that the coordinated strike was by “people who know the network”.