The Paris region has not been affected.
A far-left activist was arrested yesterday at a facility of the French railway company SNCF, police sources said.
France is leaning towards the possibility that far-left extremists were behind last week’s sabotage of the country’s SNCF rail network – which coincided with the opening ceremony of the Olympics – Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said.
“We have identified the profiles of many people,” Darmanin told France 2 TV about the hunt for these saboteurs. He added that the modus operandi of the saboteurs bore the characteristics of far-left extremists, without giving examples.
Far-left French anarchists have a history of targeting the rail network with arson attacks.
The attacks were “deliberate, very precise, extremely targeted,” Darmanin said. “This is the traditional type of far-left action,” he said.
But when asked if the profiles detected were close to the far left, Darmanin said: “We have to be careful.”
He said “the question is whether they were manipulated” or acted “for their own benefit”.
“These are people who may be close to this movement,” the interior minister added.
A statement signed by “an unexpected delegation” was sent to several media outlets, expressing support for the sabotage and criticizing the Olympics as a “celebration of nationalism” and the oppression of peoples by nation states.
Darmanin said the statement was “something like a claim” but “we have to be careful because it could be an opportunistic claim”.
Saboteurs hit France’s high-speed rail network on Friday with pre-dawn attacks on signaling substations and cables at critical points, causing travel chaos hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
All trains started running again on Monday morning after teams worked around the clock over the weekend to repair the damage, Transport Minister Patrice Vergrite told RTL radio.
A total of 800,000 people faced travel disruptions due to the attacks, including 100,000 people whose trains had to be cancelled, he said, adding that the cost to state rail operator SNCF would be significant.
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