Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation after saboteurs attacked France’s high-speed railway network in a series of “malicious acts” that brought chaos to the country’s busiest rail lines hours before the Olympic opening ceremony.
The state-owned railway operator, SNCF, said arsonists targeted installations along high-speed TGV lines connecting Paris with the country’s west, north and east, and traffic would be severely disrupted across the country into the weekend.
“This is a massive attack on a large scale to paralyse the TGV network,” the SNCF said, adding that many services would have to be cancelled. The French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said security forces were “hoping to swiftly make arrests” and he was not aware of any threat to the ceremony.
The Paris public prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, said a formal investigation had been launched into “deliberate damage of property likely to harm the fundamental interests of the nation”, as well as criminal association.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but news agencies cited security sources as saying the same arson method had previously been used by extreme-left groups, though there was no evidence to suggest this was the case in Friday’s attacks.
In September, responsibility for near-identical attacks that caused travel disruption in northern Germany was claimed on an extreme-left website. A security expert, Jérôme Poirot, told RMC radio he thought the attacks were more likely “decided by Russia”.
The national train operator said it had been “the victim of several simultaneous malicious acts overnight” in which crucial fibre-optic cables running alongside the tracks had been cut and burned.
It urged all passengers who could to postpone their journeys. Services had resumed by mid-afternoon, although with significant delays on all affected lines. The worst affected route, to the south-west, was able to run one TGV in three.
SNCF’s chief executive, Jean-Pierre Farandou, said the attackers had set fires in conduits carrying cables that carry safety information for drivers or control points mechanisms. “There’s a huge number of bundled cables. We have to repair them one by one, it’s a manual operation” requiring hundreds of workers, he said.
Farandou said five of the TGV network’s “strategic nerve centres” had been targeted on the main high-speed lines connecting Paris to big provincial cities such as Lille in the north, Bordeaux in the south-west, Strasbourg in the east and Marseille in the south-east.
All the attacks took place between 1am and 5.30am on Friday, French media reported. Four were successful, leaving only the south-eastern line running normally after a night railway maintenance team surprised several saboteurs who fled, France Info radio reported.
“Everything leads us to believe that these were criminal actions,” the transport minister, Patrice Vergriete, told reporters. “The coordinated timing, vans found where people had fled, arsonists who were discovered on the sites.”
He said there was “little beyond the date” to link the sabotage to the Games, and that given holidaymakers were by far the worst affected it seemed likely it was “more the huge getaway weekend” that was targeted.
Valérie Pécresse, the head of the Île-de-France region that includes Paris and its surrounding area, said: “Clearly this attack is not a coincidence, it aimed to destabilise France at the moment the Olympic and Paralympic Games are launched.”
The prime minister, Gabriel Attal, said he wanted to “say to the French people that I share their anger and sadness at a time when they wanted only one thing – to rejoin their families, their friends, and, for some, to attend the Olympic Games”.
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Attal said a new timetable would be drawn up as soon as possible. “This operation was coordinated,” he added. “The sites that were targeted were nerve centres. That shows a knowledge of the network.”
The prefect in charge of Paris policing, Laurent Nuñez, said more officers were being diverted to stations on Friday. “The entirety of France’s security and intelligence services have been mobilised,” he told France Télévisions.
The sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, condemned the vandalism. “It’s completely appalling,” she told BFMTV. “To target the games is to target France.”
Several Olympic fixtures, including football matches, will be taking place in stadiums outside Paris, including Nantes and Bordeaux. The travel plans of about 800,000 French holidaymakers will be disrupted this weekend. Farandou said it was a “sad day” because families would be the worst affected by attacks by “irresponsible lunatics”.
On one of the busiest holiday departure weekends of the summer, large crowds of passengers were stranded at mainline TGV stations including the Gare Montparnasse in Paris, which serves Brittany and the south-west, after their trains were cancelled.
Eurostar trains from London to Paris have also been affected. “All high-speed trains going to and coming from Paris are being diverted via the classic line,” the company said. A quarter of Eurostars between London and Paris on Friday, Saturday and Sunday have been cancelled.
In an apparently unrelated incident, the Basel-Mulhouse airport in eastern France was closed briefly and evacuated after a security alert and a bomb disposal team was deployed, local authorities said. Flights resumed in the early afternoon.
The coordinated strikes on the rail network will raise apprehension before the Olympics opening ceremony on the Seine on Friday, when more than 300,000 spectators are expected to line the riverbanks as a flotilla of barges and riverboats sail through the heart of Paris.
About 45,000 police, 10,000 soldiers and 2,000 private security agents have been deployed to secure the event, with snipers stationed on rooftops and drones patrolling from the air.
