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28-07-2024
PARIS: Three out of 10 French high-speed trains will be cancelled on Saturday on routes hit by a series of “coordinated” arson attacks.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said security forces continued to search for the “saboteurs” responsible after rail networks were paralyzed ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games.
National rail company SNCF said services which do run on Saturday will be delayed for up to two hours on major lines running in and out of Paris, while a quarter of Eurostar services will also be cancelled.
France’s transport minister said services would return to normal by Monday morning.
SNCF estimated that about 250,000 passengers were affected on Friday, while junior transport minister Patrice Vergriete said as many as 800,000 could be impacted over three days.
Eurostar which runs international services from London to Paris and uses a high-speed line in France, said one in four of its trains would not run over the weekend.
Travelers have been advised to postpone their journeys, with disruption expected to last until Monday.
Among Eurostar customers affected on Friday was Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who had planned to travel to the Games’ opening ceremony via train but was forced to fly instead.
He told media; “I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t frustrating because it was, and for very many people it made travel so much harder.”
There has still been no claim of responsibility for the damage, SNCF said.
The company said its staff had “worked all night under difficult conditions in the rain” to repair damage.
The “strategic” vandalism saw cabling boxes at junctions on the North, Brittany and South-West lines set alight hours before the Olympics opening ceremony was due to begin in the capital.
Saboteurs cut and set fire to specialized fiber optic cables essential for the safe functioning of the rail network, government officials said.
A source linked to the investigation told media that the operation was “well-prepared” and organized by “a single structure”.
Rail workers foiled an attempt to destroy safety equipment on a fourth line.
“At this stage, traffic will remain disrupted on Sunday on the North axis and should improve on the Atlantic axis for weekend returns,” a spokesman for the rail network said on Saturday morning.
Day before yesterday, everything was in place.
Streets in the centre of Paris were blocked off, metro stations closed and thousands of police, soldiers and other guards deployed to maintain security on the big showpiece day to kick off the Olympics but the saboteurs struck away from the capital, at five apparently unguarded places.
France’s state-owned rail company SNCF said the saboteurs either vandalized or tried to vandalize five signal boxes and electricity installations between 01:00 and 05:30 on Friday.
One site was at Courtalain, east of Le Mans and 150km to the south-west of Paris. The local community’s social media page posted a picture of burnt-out cables in a shallow gulley, with its protective SNCF paving stones discarded.
The SNCF spoke of a “massive, large-scale attack aimed at paralyzing” its services, involving arson and theft targeting cabling, not just at Courtalain but at Pagny-sur-Moselle, a village outside the eastern city of Metz and Croisilles, not far from the northern city of Arras. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
