Rail Sabotage Blights an Olympic Moment for France
Before dawn on the day of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, arsonists on Friday sabotaged three critical high-speed rail lines, stranding thousands of travelers, heightening security fears and blighting what President Emmanuel Macron hoped to be a moment of national glory.
Around 4 a.m., the arsonists cut through and burned cables used for signaling and security near three rail divides, the French authorities said. The carefully placed strikes snarled end-of-week travel plans for more than a million people, including Parisians leaving for vacation and international travelers en route to the opening ceremony of the Games. Parts of the prized rail system came to a standstill.
A fourth sabotage attempt was foiled, the authorities said, when railway workers doing maintenance work in Vergigny, southeast of Paris, stumbled upon suspicious individuals who fled before any damage was done.
No one was killed or reported injured. The Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles major organized crime cases, said it had opened an investigation into what it called criminal vandalism and criminal conspiracy. No immediate claim of responsibility was made.
“This operation was prepared, coordinated, critical points were targeted, which shows they knew enough about the network to know where to strike,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said.
He added, “All of our services are obviously mobilized to organize the games so that they are a success.”
The sabotage, set at critical junctures on France’s Atlantic, North and East rail arteries, meant trains were parked or slowed between Paris and major cities that are hosting some Olympic competitions, including Bordeaux, Marseille, Nice and Lille.
Railway workers hustled to make delicate repairs and traffic picked up again in the afternoon, but the national railway company warned that it would take several days for the network to fully be functioning again. It also meant some Olympians would possibly miss the opening ceremony, which continued as planned.
“It should have been a celebration,” said Jean-Pierre Farandou, the head of the S.N.C.F., the French national railway company. “Many French people were going to go up to Paris, were going to have fun, all that is ruined.”
The news came on an already tense day in Paris, where security has been tightening for weeks before the opening ceremony, promoted as the most open in modern history. By evening, the world’s best athletes floated down the Seine, surrounded by performers and some 400,000 spectators packed in stands and leaning out of windows.
The goal of the unorthodox ceremony, Mr. Macron has said, was to “show France under its best light,” and “show that we can do extraordinary things.”
The heart of the city has been transformed into a fortress over the past eight days, with 45,000 police officers — about 10 times more than usual — pouring in, on top of 10,000 soldiers, search dogs, bomb squads and tactical teams, and more than 44,000 metal fences demarking a gray-zone around the flotilla’s route. More than two dozen metro stations have been shuttered, and the airspace over and around Paris for 93 miles was temporarily closed.
Sidestepping the precautions in Paris, the saboteurs picked targets far outside the capital, targeting a rail network so vast, experts say, that it is impossible to secure every foot of it. They also carefully chose where to strike: just before junctures that split the tracks in two directions, ensuring that both branches of the line would be affected.
“The S.N.C.F. faces attacks on its network every year, every month even,” said Julien Joly, a transportation expert at the Wavestone consulting firm. “But never in these proportions, and never in such a coordinated way.”
Four main high-speed lines sprout out of Paris, connecting it to the rest of the country. The railway company said arsonists successfully targeted infrastructure in Courtalain, southwest of Paris; Pagny-sur-Moselle, to the east; and Croisilles, to the north. All are more than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, from the French capital.
An arson attack was thwarted on the southern line leading to the French Alps and the Mediterranean, the railway company said.
France’s train network has 28,000 kilometers, or about 17,400 miles, of tracks used by 15,000 trains every day. Much of it is separate from the high-speed train network.
But the T.G.V.s, as the high-speed trains are known, whisk thousands of passengers across the country daily, and are one of France’s most valued national infrastructures — a symbol of its technical prowess.
“They hit a very strong symbol of France,” said Gilles Dansart, the director of Mobilettre, an online newsletter on rail transportation in France.
As the country’s train system jewel, the high-speed network remains its most protected, Mr. Dansart said, with fences, security cameras, protected access doors and tours by agents at the most critical locations.
That spurred speculation that the attackers had access to internal information.
“People had to know how the trains work and the location of these boxes,” said Guillaume Farde, a security expert who teaches at the Sciences Po university in Paris. “You have to have the right information.”
He added: “It was more of an annoyance than it is a danger. No one was hurt, nobody’s life was at risk and no train derailed. We’re not on that scale at all.”
The rail company said on Friday evening that it had “stepped up” surveillance of its network “on the ground and in the air.” About 1,000 maintenance workers, 40 railway police teams and 50 drones are monitoring the network, the company said.
At Paris’s train stations on Friday, the attacks replaced the usual rhythm of arrivals and departures with a tense atmosphere of uncertainty. Hundreds of stranded passengers crowded the concourses, sorting out their plans.
“I don’t know when I will be able to escape,” said Ermine Touré at the Gare Montparnasse, a major transportation artery in Paris, three hours after she had hoped to leave the city for a vacation in Nantes, in western France. “Paris is a mess so I wanted to go today.”
At the station, other travelers hunched over their phones looking for alternate routes out. Children waited atop makeshift seats of suitcases. A slew of announcements played over the loudspeaker system. The words “act of malice” and “vandalism” echoed throughout the hall, doing little to quell the anxiety.
Some people found their way to the rental car kiosks only to confront long lines of others who had the same idea.
The disruptions were also felt in London, where Eurostar, which operates trains to Paris, had delays of as long as 75 minutes. Eurostar said in a statement that it would cancel 25 percent of its trains through Sunday.
At St. Pancras International in London, travelers waited in long lines. Mary McCarthy, 65, started the day at 4 a.m. in West Cork, Ireland, driving to a nearby airport and flying to London to take the Eurostar to Paris. She was waiting for her daughter to join her and hoping her afternoon train to Paris was still running.
“If we can get there, we’ll be happy,” she said.
Ségolène Le Stradic and Hannah Beech contributed reporting from Paris; John Yoon from Seoul; and Isabella Kwai from London.
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