Chaos on French rail network as 'mass attack' on opening day of Olympic Games

The criminal acts of sabotage primarily affect the four main high-speed train (TAV) lines, making traffic on many other lines more difficult.

Patrice Vergriete, Minister of Transport, who has resigned but is still in office, makes a very harsh preliminary assessment: “Everything points to the fact that our national rail network has suffered a series of attacks and criminal arsons, conceived and carried out by teams of criminals who had planned their actions for a long time.”

Jean-Pierre Farandou, general manager of the SNCF, fully confirms these suspicions and provides basic information: «On Friday around 4 a.m., a significant number of fires broke out, close to pipelines and tunnels through which many cables pass, essential for a healthy traffic operation. The fires immediately disrupted traffic: it was impossible for trains to circulate if all or many indicators were victims of criminal fires.

Once the problem was discovered, over 800,000 passengers were the first victims of sabotage. The restoration of traffic will take several days.

The fires have cut or damaged thousands of cables. Technicians will have to repair the damage cable by cable, station by station. Thousands of technicians have been mobilized. But these are acts of criminal sabotage on an unprecedented scale. And the “normalization” work risks taking several days.

Valérie Pécresse, president of the Ile-de-France region (Paris and Paris), the country's most important region, gives a very political reading of the sabotage: “This massive and coordinated attack on the four major national railway lines and traffic confirms that this is an attempt to destabilize France. New attacks are to be feared. “Paris and its region are in the sights of the enemies of our nation.”

Without going into it directly, Pécresse, a liberal-conservative political personality, indirectly alludes to it Vladimir Putin.

Since the end of March last year, the French, German and British security and counter-intelligence services have identified sabotage projects against European interests.

A few weeks ago, the French Ministry of the Interior identified and neutralized an imprecise number of people who had devised actions of a very diverse nature, always criminal.

In early May, the Continental financial reference newspaper, 'Financial Times', published a report collecting 'growing' concerns and doubts about possible threats from agents paid or contracted by Vladimir Putin.

In Paris, BFMTV, the first permanent audiovisual information channel, made public at the end of May the “concern” of Emmanuel Macron's government about the imminent risk of “sabotage and destabilization actions”.

Faced with the sabotage at dawn on Friday, the Ministry of the Interior has preferred to maintain a cautious silence from the outset, which fails to completely hide suspicions with very deep and well-founded roots.

The Eurostar was also hit

The Eurostar has also been affected and has cancelled its service between London and London Paris and extending the journey time. “As a result of coordinated acts of vandalism in France affecting the high-speed line between Paris and Lille, all high-speed trains departing from or ending in Paris today, Friday 26 July, will be diverted along the classic line. This will extend the journey time by approximately one and a half hours,” the company said.

According to what a source close to the case told AFP, it is a coordinated “sabotage”, a series of acts carried out in a “coordinated” manner. “We are diverting some trains to the classic line, but we will have to cancel a large number,” the SNCF said. The south-eastern high-speed line, however, was not affected, the group said.

“All customers will be notified by SMS of the circulation of their trains,” the