It was the moment France and the world had been waiting for – the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games down the river Seine, the first ever for a Summer Games outside a stadium.
But as the country awoke to the final Olympic countdown and the prospect of a spectacular show involving 7,500 athletes, 300,000 spectators, superstar appearances and an audience of VIPs, saboteurs had already thrown a huge spanner in the works.
In the early hours of Friday, reports emerged of a “massive” and “co-ordinated” sabotage attack on the country’s high-speed national rail tracks, which essentially knocked out most lines to and from northern, eastern and western France.
While officials insisted the opening ceremony itself would suffer no disruption, Gabriel Attal, France’s acting prime minister, said: “The consequences for the rail network are massive and serious.”
“Our intelligence services and law enforcement agencies are mobilised to find and punish the perpetrators of these criminal acts,” he added.
French authorities had laid on a large, high-tech security regime to defend the Olympics, with Reaper drones in the skies and AI-powered cameras on the ground to keep an eye out for suspicious activity.
But Friday’s attack suggests they paid far less attention to key rail routes, which were sabotaged by old-fashioned arson rather than cyber-attacks.
The saboteurs chose to avoid the heavily guarded French capital and instead struck rural targets in the middle of the night. While hundreds of armed police officers and soldiers patrolled the streets of Paris, several cables were apparently set alight in the commune of Courtalain, around 150km south-west of the capital.
The local community’s social media page posted a picture of burnt-out cables in a shallow gully, with its protective paving stones discarded.
SNCF, France’s state-owned rail company, says the saboteurs either vandalised or tried to vandalise five signal boxes and electricity installations between 1am and 5.30am local time on Friday.
They struck not just at Courtalain but at Pagny-sur-Moselle, a village outside the eastern city of Metz, and Croisilles, not far from the northern city of Arras.
The targeted sites are small but are located at crucial junctions on the high-speed network.
Another attempted attack, on a TGV junction to the south east of Paris at Vergigny, was foiled by SNCF workers who happened to be carrying out maintenance in the early hours of Friday.
Matthieu Chabanel, head of SNCF Réseau, which runs SNCF’s infrastructure, said staff first detected a major problem at 4am.
“Fifty cables of 10 wires each makes 500 cables to reconnect linked to installations that are essential for safety, such as signalling,” he told Le Monde.
Patrice Vergriete, the French transport minister, said that France had received no warning of the attacks but that “we are preparing for (others)”.
“Today we are on alert, so obviously we have mobilised all security forces, as well as drones, so today we have greatly increased our vigilance”, he told TF1.
It remains unclear who is behind the crippling attacks that affected 250,000 passengers on Friday and are estimated to hit 800,000 over the weekend.
Senior figures have suggested the sabotage could have been carried out by hard-Left radicals or Russia, whose athletes have been barred from the opening ceremony.
But whoever committed this crime knew what they were doing as they chose strategic “switch points” to cause maximum damage. “For one fire, you hit two destinations”, said Jean-Pierre Farandou, head of SNCF.
“Part of France is under attack. The French are under attack,” he told BFMTV.
Friday was a huge day of departures for hundreds of thousands of French leaving Paris to go on holiday by train and car. Thousands more were due to arrive in Paris to attend the opening ceremony.
The saboteurs “knew where to hit”, said Mr Attal, adding that they had “knowledge of the network”.
“What we know, what we can see is that this operation has been planned, coordinated, that key points have been targeted which shows a kind of knowledge of the [train] network,” he added.
One in four Eurostar trains was cancelled on Friday and over the weekend, spoiling Olympic plans for some British fans.
Toby Morris told The Telegraph a friend gave him boxing tickets along with £250 train tickets to Paris as a gift.
“I thought I’d come here to try my chances, but they’ve said I definitely can’t get on another train today, so I just won’t be able to go now,” he said.
Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister, told the press that the sabotage had no “direct consequence on the organisation of the Olympic Games”.
However, Downing Street said Sir Keir Starmer had to change his travel plans as he was meant to travel on the Eurostar to Paris but flew instead.
Sir Keir earlier insisted that travel disruption would not “overshadow” the Olympic Games.
SNCF urged passengers to postpone their trips, stay away from train stations and await text message instructions, but by Friday afternoon, traffic was slowly resuming to western France – with one in three trains operating – while trains to the east and north had resumed with delays.
Valérie Pécresse, the Paris regional council head, said: “Clearly this attack is not a coincidence. This attack is an attempt to destabilise France.”
Suspicions of Russian involvement were raised this week when a Russian reality TV “bachelor” turned Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef was unmasked as an alleged spy plotting to sabotage the Olympics.
Jérôme Poirot, terrorism expert for RMC-BFMTV, a French television and radio network, added: “We know that Russia and other countries want to interfere with the Olympic Games. There may be a plan in place to prevent the opening ceremony.”
Israel, on the other hand, blamed Iran. Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, said: “The sabotage of railway infrastructure across France ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics was planned and executed under the influence of Iran’s axis of evil and radical Islam.”
But Mr Attal advised against jumping to conclusions.
“The investigation is starting, and I would urge everyone to exercise caution. What we know, what we can see, is that this operation was prepared, coordinated, that key points were targeted, which shows a kind of knowledge of the network in order to know where to strike”, he said.
Emmanuel Macron declined to comment.
Asked if the arson attacks were the work of Russia or a terrorist group, Amélie Oudéa-Castera, the French sports minister, responded: “Maybe,” before adding: “It could also be protesters – even French people.”
It emerged on Friday that a similar incendiary device to the ones found at the sabotage sites on Friday was detected in May on a high-speed line between Marseille and Aix-en-Provence. An investigation was launched but no arrests were made.
Jean de Gliniasty, the former French ambassador to Moscow, told LCI the threat could have come from the far-Left.
“There’s a tradition in France of black blocs, every time there’s a demonstration they destroy, they break things,” he said. “In fact, France has been facing these problems for several years now, and we haven’t managed to solve them.”
In 2008, French anti-terrorist police arrested 10 members of a “violent anarchist movement” for sabotaging power cables on high-speed TGV train lines. Severe delays were caused when power was cut by metal bars hooked onto overhead electric cables on TGV lines around Paris.
However, in what was called a judicial “fiasco”, the “Tarnac ten” were later all acquitted.
Some French unions, including the powerful Leftist CGT, had called for strikes during the Games over working conditions but these were mainly withdrawn due to concessions.
Paris prosecutors said an investigation has been launched into charges of “damaging property likely to harm the fundamental interests of the nation”, “damage and attempted damage by dangerous means in an organised gang”, “attacks on an automated data processing system in an organised gang” and “criminal conspiracy”.
Source Agencies
