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French authorities think far-left groups could have been behind a mass sabotage of the country’s high-speed rail lines on the day of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
Interior minister Gérald Darmanin on Monday said the methods identified in last week’s rail sabotage, which disrupted thousands of journeys, resembled those of far-left extremists who had carried out similar attacks on a smaller scale. He cautioned that the full picture was not yet known.
“We’ve identified a certain number of profiles of people who could have committed these acts of sabotage,” Darmanin told France 2 TV station. “It’s traditionally the way far-left groups act.”
Telecoms operators were also hit by a separate incident that saw some of their fibre-optic cables cut in multiple departments in France. Iliad, which markets its offers under the brand name Free, confirmed that there had been a “multi-operator” incident in the departments of Aude, Herault, Marne, Meuse and Vaucluse, and its teams were working to repair the situation.
The damage was made to operators’ long-distance fibre lines that cross the country and are located underground and usually in fenced in locations. Police are investigating at the five sites, but officials have not yet given explanations of what happened.
The state-backed operator Orange said it had not been hit by any outages or incidents. SFR, which is owned by Patrick Drahi’s Altice, said: “These are acts of vandalism.” The impact on SFR clients is not significant because of re-routing and back-up systems.
Three major high-speed axes connecting Paris to the north, east and west of the country were felled when electricity cables were cut while arsonists also set fire to connection and signal boxes.
Separately, prosecutors in Rouen said a man had been arrested late on Saturday at another railway site in Normandy. A train driver had spotted several people near an installation containing electricity cables, and police arrested the man when he came to collect his car, in which they found several objects including paint spray cans.
AFP reported that the man also had keys to SNCF equipment, pliers and written material linked to far-left movements.
Darmanin also said that just under 50 activists from environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion had been detained over the weekend, after police identified they had planned acts of “sabotage or radical action” during the first days of sporting competitions.
Normal train services had virtually resumed by Monday after a mad dash by repair teams from the SNCF state-owned train operator to get the lines up and running. But investigators are still trying to definitively pinpoint who was behind the attack, with even Darmanin cautioning that he could not rule out that far-left groups could be proxies for others.
“There’s the question of whether these people were manipulated by other people or whether they were acting for themselves,” Darmanin said.
In the run-up to the Games, French police and intelligence services had been on high alert over the possibility that Russia could seek also to disrupt the Olympics, including through cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.
Patrice Vergriete, France’s transport minister, told the Financial Times on Friday that the methods used by the saboteurs had been far from sophisticated. But Darmanin on Monday added that the attackers had known exactly where to hit to cause maximum damage, and said this showed they had access to sensitive and precise SNCF information.
Darmanin said an anonymous letter reportedly received by several news outlets over the weekend, claiming the attackers had specifically sought to hit the Olympics, could have been fake or opportunistic.
Some 800,000 people were affected over a big weekend for holiday departures by the chaos. In the event, most were able to travel while 100,000 people had their trains cancelled, Vergriete told RTL radio on Monday.
Some phone lines outside Paris appeared to have been hit on Monday by acts of sabotage that had caused localised outages. Marina Ferrari, the minister for digital affairs, said on X that telecoms infrastructure had been degraded “overnight in several departments”.
“I strongly condemn these irresponsible and cowardly acts,” Ferrari added, saying some fibre optic connections and phone lines had been affected and were being repaired.
Telecoms operator Free said some of its services had been affected in six French departments, from Aude to the Bouches du Rhône. Orange said its services had not been affected.