Man Detained in France After Entering Rail Site Near Rouen
A man in his 20s was detained in northern France after he broke into a railway site, the French authorities said on Monday, as the police continued to search for arsonists who sabotaged train-signaling cables last week, causing travel chaos ahead of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
The Paris prosecutor’s office, which is handling the investigation into those arson attacks, said that the man who was taken into custody was not a suspect in those incidents.
Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, identified the man as an “ultraleft” activist but did not give his name. He was taken into custody on Sunday at a site belonging to France’s national railway company, the S.N.C.F., near the city of Rouen, the authorities said.
French security and transportation authorities had tightened their monitoring of the transportation network after last week’s sabotage, in which arsonists cut and set fire to crucial cables at three signaling stations around the country.
Since the attack, the authorities have deployed about 1,000 railway workers, 250 railway security agents, 50 drones and several police helicopters to monitor France’s vast rail network.
Mr. Darmanin cautioned that it was too early to say what had motivated the attacks but said that the arson last week was the “traditional method of action” of anarchist or anticapitalist, far-left fringe groups. Those groups generally oppose the French state and see the railway network as one of its symbols.
“What has really interested and worried us is that these are extremely specific locations used for communication,” Mr. Darmanin told France 2 television on Monday. “Clearly it was extremely well-targeted; it was not done randomly.”
The attacks last week caused travel disruptions for several days, but high-speed train traffic was back to normal on Monday after railway employees worked “tirelessly” to complete repairs, according to the S.N.C.F.
The authorities also announced on Monday that the fiber-optic networks of several telecommunication companies had been vandalized overnight in several French regions. The motivation for the vandalism remained unclear.
Phone service disruptions were limited. But in a sign of how seriously the French authorities were treating the incidents, the Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles major cases of organized crime, said it would look into the “deterioration of telecommunications relay equipment” as well.
Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that the potential charges were similar to those being considered in the arson attacks, including criminal conspiracy and “damage to property likely to affect the fundamental interests of the nation.”
The man who was detained on Sunday was born in 1995 in Rouen, in the Normandy region, according to the Rouen prosecutor’s office.
A train conductor had seen several people near a railway electrical cabinet just south of Rouen, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. The individuals, who fled as the conductor passed by, were in an area that is not open to the public.
The man was picked up when he went back to retrieve his vehicle, which had been left behind, the prosecutor’s office said, adding that he was being held for questioning.
The French authorities also said that they were working with telecommunications companies to restore service fully in the nine areas where fiber-optic cables were damaged, mainly in the south and east of the country.
The timing and infrastructure targeted point to acts of sabotage “at a time when the whole world has its eyes on the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” the French Telecoms Federation, a grouping of France’s main electronic communications operators, said in a statement.
The cuts affected the equivalent of “highways” that are used by operators for long-distance purposes and that are sometimes rented out to other companies, the federation said, adding that repair work like soldering was ongoing.
“Backup solutions, based on the use of redundant infrastructure, are operational in certain cases,” the federation said, resulting in “limited” customer impact.
SFR, one of France’s main phone and internet providers, said in its own statement that its infrastructure had been vandalized between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. in five different departments, in northern, eastern and southern France.
“I condemn these cowardly and irresponsible acts in the strongest possible terms,” Marina Ferrari, the junior minister in charge of digital affairs, said on X.
#Man #Detained #France #Entering #Rail #Site #Rouen