France was on Monday probing the possible involvement of ultra-left movements in attacks that paralysed parts of its high-speed rail network before the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony on Friday, as new acts of sabotage affected fibre optic cables in several areas overnight from Sunday to Monday.
France is leaning towards the likelihood that far-left extremists were behind last week's sabotage of the country's SNCF rail network – which coincided with the Olympic Games opening ceremony – French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on Monday.
"We have identified the profiles of several people," Darmanin told France 2 TV, regarding the hunt for those saboteurs.
Far-left French anarchists have a history of targeting the train network with arson attacks.
The attacks were "deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted", Darmanin said. "This is the traditional type of action of the ultra-left," he said.
But when asked whether the profiles that were identified were close to the far left, Darmanin said: "We must be cautious."
He said "the question is to know 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 news media outlets expressing support for the sabotage and criticising the Olympic Games as being a "celebration of nationalism" and the oppression of peoples by nation states.
Darmanin said the statement was "something that resembles a claim", but "we must be careful because it could be an opportunistic claim".
French authorities arrested an ultra-left activist at a site belonging to national rail operator SNCF in northern France, a police source told AFP on Monday.
The man was detained at Oissel on Sunday and had access keys to SNCF technical premises, tools and literature linked to the ultra-left, said the source, asking not to be named.
The suspect was placed in police custody for questioning in Rouen, the main city of France's Normandy region.
Saboteurs struck France's high-speed train network on Friday with pre-dawn attacks on signal substations and cables at critical points, causing travel chaos hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
All trains were back up and running by Monday morning after teams worked around the clock over the weekend to fix the damage, Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete said on RTL radio.
Overall 800,000 people faced travel disruptions because of the attacks, including 100,000 people whose trains had to be cancelled outright, he said, adding the cost to the state-owned rail operator SNCF would be considerable.
Fibre optic cables hit by 'vandalism' on Sunday night
In a separate incident, France's telecoms network suffered isolated outages after being hit by acts of vandalism overnight, affecting some fixed and mobile services, junior minister for digital matters Marina Ferrari said on Monday on X.
"I condemn, in the strongest terms, these cowardly and irresponsible acts," said Ferrari before thanking digital teams for repairing and restoring affected sites earlier Monday.
A French police official said there were issues in at least six of the country's administrative departments, which include the region around the Mediterranean city of Marseille, which is hosting Olympic soccer and sailing competitions.
Paris Games organisers said they had been informed of acts of sabotage on fiber optic networks across several French departments but “we can only confirm that there is no impact on our operations”.
Police said the cables of several telecoms operators had been sabotaged in six areas of France overnight from Sunday into Monday, but Paris was not affected.
AFP confirmed with major carriers including Free and SFR that they had been affected, although no major disruptions had yet been reported.
"It's vandalism," said Nicolas Chatin, spokesman for SFR, one of France's four biggest operators. "Large sections of cables were cut. You would have to use an axe or a grinder."
But the group minimised the impact of any disruption, saying that in the end only 10,000 fixed-line customers had been affected.
Paris chief prosecutor Laure Beccuau said police had opened a second criminal probe into the fibre optic cable incidents, saying the perpetrators were suspected of "causing material damage with the intention of harming fundamental interests of the nation".
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)
