France suspects far-left groups were behind rail sabotage, minister says

By Sudip Kar-Gupta and Gabriel Stargardter

PARIS (Reuters) -France suspects members of far-left groups were behind the sabotage of the high-speed rail network last week just as the Olympic Games were about to begin, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Monday.

Saboteurs struck the network on Friday with pre-dawn attacks on signal substations and cables at critical points, causing travel chaos hours before the opening ceremony in Paris.

"We have identified the profiles of several people," Darmanin told France 2 TV, adding that the sabotage bore the hallmarks of far-left groups.

The Paris prosecutors office, whose organised crime branch is leading the investigation, said no arrests had been made so far.

A police source involved in the probe said it was "too soon to tell" if there was a link with acts of vandalism overnight that targeted the country's telecommunications network.

Isolated communications outages affected some mobile, fixed phone and internet services on Monday due to the vandalism, junior minister for digital matters Marina Ferrari said on X.

In recent years, France has mainly been targeted in attacks by Islamist militants, but security services have been increasingly concerned about far-left or anarchist groups, which typically oppose the state and capitalism.

The then-head of France's domestic intelligence agency, Nicolas Lerner, told Le Monde newspaper last year President Emmanuel Macron's divisive 2023 pension shake-up had helped lure recruits to far-left groups, which have increasingly added environmental issues to their ideologies.

"In recent years, the far-left movements have been known for particularly violent clandestine actions, including arson campaigns ... ransacking and destruction of property," Lerner, who now leads the foreign spy agency, said in the interview.

In a 2023 report on terrorism trends, European police agency Europol said left-wing and anarchist groups typically attacked "critical infrastructure, such as repeaters and antennas, government institutions and private companies" with their "most common modus operandi" being arson and explosive devices.

Train services in France were back up and running by early Monday after teams worked around the clock at the weekend to fix the damage, Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete told RTL radio.

He said 800,000 people had faced travel disruptions and said the cost to the state-owned rail operator SNCF would be considerable.

(Additional reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten and Layli Foroudi; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Sharon Singleton and Helen Popper)