France Points Finger at Ultra-Left Anarchists for Major Olympics Rail Sabotage

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Adrien Olichon / Pexels
Oliver JJ Lane

After days of speculation over who may have been responsible for the crippling sabotage against French railways around Paris on the day of the Olympics opening ceremony last week the government is making clear it believed the “ultra-left” may be responsible, but has stopped short of naming a group or organisation yet.

A suspected “ultra-left” activist was arrested at a railway facility on Sunday, as France gets its rail network back up and running after a massive act of sabotage was sprung in the hours leading up to the Olympics opening ceremony. Hundreds of thousands of travellers, either intended to get into Paris to enjoy the festivities or to leave the city as the holiday season continues to get underway were severely delayed or stranded after a coordinated attack at several sites surrounding Paris saw fibre optic cables carrying the data to control points and signals were cut and burnt.

Authorities now admit the hard-left were likely responsible for the attack, days after the fact, despite the clear left-wing modus operandi in the execution.

French police say dozens of specialist forensic officers have worked through the weekend to identify samples left behind by the saboteurs at the sites, and the interim French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has now said “We have recovered a certain number of elements that allow us to believe that we will know fairly quickly who is responsible”.

Speaking on Monday, the President Macron acolyte said the attack had been “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted” and that the modus operandi of cutting the communication cables that are essential to the operating of modern life matched with “the traditional type of action of the ultra left”.

Over the weekend a message of support and praise for the attack on France’s railway network was sent anonymously to several French newspapers. Broadsheet Le Figaro stated the message was written using the language of “anarchist ultra-left activists”, and said of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony which the sabotage had apparently been intended to impact: “They call this a party? We see it as a celebration of nationalism, a gigantic staging of the subjugation of populations by States”.

Nevertheless, Darmanin stopped short of naming any specific left-wing group of movement, saying there was still time for caution and that the saboteurs may be adjacent to a movement. Of the “anarchist ultra-left” message, he said it could be an opportunistic move rather than by the saboteurs themselves.

Hundreds of railway employees have worked back-to-back shifts to get France’s world-famous high speed rail lines out of Paris operating again, and the operator SNCF said they had achieved this by early Monday morning. The body praised the “exceptional mobilisation” of their staff who “have worked tirelessly since Friday morning” to complete the repairs by today.

Even as the railway workers completed the signalling and safety repairs of Friday’s attack overnight Monday, France woke up to another massive sabotage attack today with internet infrastructure — fibre optic cables again — cut across the country. The cables of several internet providers in six French regions across the country are impacted, hitting internet access, mobile telephones, and landline calls, but Paris was spared this time.

Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Marina Ferrari said Monday morning: “Damages committed in several departments last night affected our telecommunications operators.

“They have localized consequences on access to [internet], fixed telephony and mobile telephony… I condemn in the strongest terms these cowardly and irresponsible acts.
Thank you to the teams mobilized this morning to carry out repairs and restore damaged sites to service.”

Further developments over the weekend suggest more railway sabotage may have been planned after Friday’s major attack. On Sunday, what Darmanin called an “ultra-left militant” was arrested at a French railway facility. The man was found in a vehicle and had with him railway access keys, a pair of wire cutters, and “far-left” literature.

As intoned by the French interior minister Darmanin, cable cutting has emerged as a distinct, if little studied tactic of the “ultra-left” in several European countries this century. While these often considerable acts of sabotage tend to receive little press coverage, and the Paris Olympics attack may be the first time many will be aware of the fragility of these systems and the willingness of the left to exploit that, sabotage against the modern industrial world continues like a steady drumbeat.

Summarising this history and paraphrasing previous reports: 

As reported by Breitbart News in 2022 there was a strikingly similar attack in Germany, where “Backhaul communications  cables concerned with the Germany Railway (Deutsche Bahn, DB) radio system, safety-critical equipment without which modern, tightly timetabled and high speed trains cannot safely operate, were “willfully and intentionally severed”.”

The perpetrators were said to have “very precise knowledge of the railway’s radio system” and two cables were cut simultaneously 340 miles apart. As expressed by a German Army General at the time of that attack, the purpose of such attacks are “not about an enemy army with soldiers and tanks attacking our country [but] pinpricks in the population that are intended to stir up uncertainty and shake confidence in our state” and “every substation, every power plant, every pipeline can be attacked”.

These “pinprick attacks” undermining public confidence in the everyday systems of Western life frequently target railways. Cables supplying power to high-speed trains were sabotaged in in 2019 in Italy. As stated at the time, this attack appeared to coincide with a court ruling on a left-wing group said to have bombed a book shop.

In 2019, a radio transmitter was burnt in France. In 2020, 50,000 people lost internet access in greater Paris when cables were cut. This was said to be the culmination of a weeks-long campaign against information infrastructure.

In 2021, a series of attacks against telephone and internet services in France saw data company vehicles burnt, fibre optic cables cut, and a radio tower destroyed. Left-wingers took credit, saying: “it is not to protest against 5G in particular but in a broader context, fighting against the techno-world… We want to salute all the arsonists who are acting in the shadows at the moment and repeatedly beating this technological hell.”

In early 2022, the far-left was suspected over the sabotage of a power station and nine power lines over two nights. This left thousands of homes and a semiconductor factory without power. Days later, several French cities were left totally without internet after data cables in several locations were cut in the same night. The sabotage was done effectively enough, it was said the attackers would have to have “known the network”.

 

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