Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
France’s rail operator said on Sunday that all repairs to damaged high-speed rail lines were now complete, days after the network was sabotaged hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games.
The co-ordinated attack, which took place in the night from Thursday to Friday, disrupted traffic on much of the country’s crucial rail network, with three out of the country’s four major high-speed train lines damaged by fire. An attempt on the fourth line failed, officials said.
“Thanks to the exceptional mobilisation of our agents who have worked tirelessly since Friday morning, the repair work is now completely finished on all the high-speed lines affected by the acts of sabotage,” SNCF, the rail operator, said on Sunday morning, adding that all tests “were successful and the lines are now usable normally”.
No suspects for the attack have yet been identified and an investigation is ongoing.
All services were expected to be running normally by Monday, SNCF confirmed on Sunday. Eurostar, which runs international services from Paris and Lille to destinations including London and Brussels, said it would operate 80 per cent of its scheduled trains on Sunday, with a return to full service expected Monday.
“We have gathered a number of elements that make us think we could know fairly quickly who is responsible for what has obviously not sabotaged the Olympic Games, but rather part of the holidays of the French,” interior minister Gérald Darmanin told TF1 on Saturday, though he would not be drawn on who the potential perpetrators are.
Darmanin added that it was “too early to say” whether the attack was domestic, or masterminded from abroad.
The co-ordinated attacks on France’s rail network affected an estimated 800,000 passengers over the weekend and cast a shadow over Paris’s high-stakes opening ceremony on Friday night.
Despite the heightened state of alert, officials decided to stick with the original plan for the event, which took place over several kilometres of the Seine river in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators and visiting dignitaries, posing a massive security challenge.
Asked about the possibility that Russia could be behind the attack, transport minister Patrice Vergriete told the FT on Friday night that “all signs show it’s not a case of official foreign interference”.
“The material and methods recovered are not that sophisticated and we’ve seen this before with extremist groups. We can’t exclude anything, of course, but we’ll know soon enough as incendiary material with fingerprints has been recovered,” he added.
Ministers on Saturday expressed satisfaction and relief that the ceremony went off without a security incident. Some 45,000 police were deployed in Paris in the run-up to the event.
The ceremony “was a crazy bet, but the police and firefighters managed to do it”, Darmanin said on France 2, admitting he was “relieved” even as he and other security officials remained focused on other threats ranging from cyber attacks to terrorism that could target the games.
“The police, gendarmes and firefighters have no time off this summer so that we can turn Paris into [a place for] a party”.
Additional reporting by Sarah White in Paris
Read the full article here
