France’s train network hit by arson attacks hours before Olympic ceremony
PARIS, July 26 (Reuters) - Saboteurs struck France's TGV high-speed train network in a series of pre-dawn attacks across the country, causing travel chaos and exposing security gaps ahead of the
Paris Olympics opening ceremony later on Friday.
The coordinated sabotage took place as France mounted a massive security operation involving tens of thousands of police and soldiers to safeguard the capital for the sporting extravaganza, sucking in security resources from across the country.
SNCF, the state-owned railway operator, said vandals had damaged signal boxes along the lines connecting Paris with cities such as Lille in the north, Bordeaux in the west and Strasbourg in the east. Another attack on the Paris-Marseille line was foiled.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Two security sources said the modus operandi meant initial suspicions fell on leftist militants or environmental activists, but they said there was not yet any evidence.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal declined to speculate about the possibility of such groups being behind the sabotage.
"What we know, what we see, is that this operation was prepared, coordinated, that nerve centres were targeted, which shows a certain knowledge of the network to know where to strike," he said.
The coordinated strikes on the rail network will feed into a sense of apprehension ahead of the Olympics
opening ceremony in the heart of Paris later on Friday. Operations at the Basel-Mulhouse airport on France's border with Switzerland were briefly suspended due to a bomb alert.
