More Trains, but Few Answers, After Railway Sabotage in France
In the dark early morning, they cut into a fence protecting the high-speed rail line right outside the small town of Croisilles. Once past the fence, the culprits soldered open the metal protective cover of a culvert alongside the tracks. Then, they poured flammable liquid and set a fire, damaging around 40 cables, explained the local mayor, Gérard Dué.
Arsonists did not just strike there, 105 miles north of Paris. Around the same time, at 4 a.m., they struck cables along high-speed rail lines at one site east of the capital and another to the west.
In all three cases, their targets were precise: They chose signaling stations close to where the tracks split in two directions.
“We were in the dark on three of our principal lines in our rail network,” said Christophe Fanichet, the president of the national railway company’s passenger trains division, S.N.C.F Voyageurs.
Toiling in the rain, and often in the dark, rail workers managed the delicate task of repairing fiber optic cables. By Saturday morning, all trains rushing from Paris to the east were back on schedule, and seven of 10 trains heading north, west and southwest were running, albeit not at their full speed, which can reach 320 kilometers, or 186 miles, an hour.
While claiming success in the face of terrible stress on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris, the question facing rail workers still remains: Who did this and why?
“These people knew what to look for,” said Axel Persson, a train driver and union leader on slower rails with S.N.C.F. “They hit specific cables that pass information for traffic controllers and traffic supervisors to know what’s happening on the high-speed lines. They seem to have been quite precise in their work.”
French authorities suspect a fourth attack was in the making — this one southeast of Paris. But it was foiled by maintenance workers with the railway who came upon suspicious individuals, sending them fleeing before any damage was done, the authorities said.
They have so far said little about the suspects or their motives. No one has publicly claimed responsibility for the attacks. The Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles major cases of organized crime, has put some 50 investigators on the case, two ministers said.
Unsettling under normal circumstances, the coordinated attack came at a critical time: on the morning of the unorthodox open-air opening ceremony, when hundreds of thousands of visitors were scheduled to pour into Paris and many Parisians were fleeing the city for their summer vacations.
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 railway network, where traffic is expected to return to normal on Monday.
“The goal is to avoid a new sabotage operation,” Patrice Vergriete, France’s transportation minister, told reporters in Paris on Saturday. “We are on alert.”
Sources close to France’s intelligence agency said the attacks had some of the hallmarks of far-left anarchist groups. But France has also been put on high alert for foreign interference, particularly by Russian actors.
This past week, the police arrested and charged a 40-year-old Russian man in Paris with working at the behest of a foreign power to “provoke hostilities” in France, intending to destabilize the Olympic Games.
About 35 million euros a year, or about $38 million, is spent to protect the country’s vast and bustling train network, said Jean-Pierre Farandou, the national railway company’s president. The prized high-speed network gets special protection, with fencing and drones carrying thermal cameras, he said.
But, stretching 3,100 miles, “you can’t put a camera or a police officer at every kilometer,” he said.
The entirety of the network covers about 18,000 miles of tracks used by 15,000 trains every day.
Mr. Vergriete acknowledged that the authorities had focused on the Paris region leading up to the Olympics, reinforcing security there with an extra €5 million, but not elsewhere in the country.
“We had no particular prior warning about any danger for the network’s security,” Mr. Vergriete said. “Surveillance of the network was normal.”
“Now that we are on alert,” he added, “we are going to use much more consequential means.”
By focusing on the very centralized signaling system, and not the rails or overhead electric cables, the arsonists attacked the nerve center of the rail system, said François Delétraz, the president a federation of groups representing transportation passengers.
“A lot of intelligence went into this,” Mr. Delétraz said. “It’s like attacking a colossus at its weak spot.”
Video released on Friday by the S.N.C.F. showed workers clad in fluorescent orange hunched over clumps of charred cables as they painstakingly replaced them.
Each cable is split into dozens or even hundreds of fiber optic threads that must be repaired, reconnected and tested.
Their fast work softened the effect of disruptions that threatened to complicate the trips of more than one million travelers on Friday and over the weekend. Instead, only 100,000 people had trains canceled on Friday, and only 20 percent of the weekend’s 800,000 travelers had their trips canceled. Mr. Farandou said all Olympic teams booked on trains on Friday had arrived.
“Today, my predominant feeling is a form of pride,” Mr. Farandou said. “I am proud of these railway workers.”
Sabotage on rail lines is not uncommon in France.
In January 2023, someone pried open and set fire to electric cable boxes at a signal station in Vaires-sur-Marne, about 10 miles east of Paris, blocking traffic on the eastern high-speed line for several days. An investigation was opened that month — a time when protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise the legal retirement age were in full swing.
But the case was later dropped because the perpetrators were never identified, according to the prosecutor’s office in Meaux, which handled the case.
Then, in April 2023, arson damaged signaling infrastructure in the Landes, in southwestern France, disrupting train traffic in that region. The transportation minister at the time vowed that “this outrageous act will be punished.” Local prosecutors did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether any arrests were made in that case, but none appear to have been publicly reported.
Perhaps the most famous case of train tampering involved the Tarnac Nine — a group of young people arrested in 2008 and accused of draping horseshoe-shaped iron bars over 25,000-volt power lines to disable trains. The police and prosecutors said they were dangerous anarchists bent on overthrowing the state.
But when the case finally came to trial in 2018, French judges acquitted almost all of them on the sabotage charges.
In the case of Friday’s coordinated attacks, the potential charges include criminal conspiracy, “damage to property likely to affect the fundamental interests of the nation” and “damage and attempted damage by dangerous means in an organized gang.” They carry the risk of up to 20 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of euros in fines.
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