In a series of early-morning attacks around the nation, sabotage artists targeted France’s TGV high-speed train network, causing travel disruptions and revealing security vulnerabilities in advance of Friday’s opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics.
The planned disruption occurred while France, drawing on security resources from all over the nation, launched a massive security operation involving tens of thousands of police and troops to protect the nation’s capital for the athletic spectacle.
Vandals reportedly destroyed signal substations and cables along the lines that connected Paris to places like Lille in the north, Bordeaux in the west, and Strasbourg in the east, according to SNCF, the state-owned railway operator.
The Paris-Marseille line was protected from another attack.
No one took immediate credit for anything.
The prime suspects were environmental activists or communist militants due to the modus operandi, but no concrete evidence was provided.
Laptops 1000The inquiry will be managed by the organized crime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office, and investigations will be coordinated by the anti-terrorist sub-directorate (SDAT), a division of the judicial police that generally keeps an eye on radical environmental, hard-left, and extreme-right organizations.
Gabriel Attal, the prime minister, refrained from speculating on the likelihood that these organizations were responsible for the sabotage.
“What we know, what we see, is that this operation was prepared, coordinated, that nerve centres were targeted, which shows certain knowledge of the network to know where to strike,” he stated.
