France’s Telecom System Heavily Damaged by Sabotage: German Train Line Also Hit

Saboteurs cut long-distance fiber-optic cables in multiple areas in France Sunday, causing widespread disruption to internet services. This is the second significant act of sabotage targeting French infrastructure since the Olympic games began; the first such series of attacks targeted French high-speed rail service: see France’s High Speed Rail System Is Disabled by Terror Attacks and There Is One Very Good Suspect.

A French police official said at least six areas were affected, which include the region around the Mediterranean city of Marseille, hosting Olympic football and sailing competitions. Telecom operators Bouygues, SFR and Free confirmed their services were affected, although no major disruptions have yet been reported on Monday. “It’s vandalism,” said Nicolas Chatin, spokesman for SFR, one of France’s four biggest operators. “Large sections of cables were cut. You would have to use an axe or a grinder,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). But the group minimized the impact of any disruption, saying that in the end only 10,000 fixed-line customers had been affected.

This comes at nearly the same time as a sabotage attack on the German railway system.

It was “clearly a deliberate act” in which crucial communication cables were “consciously and deliberately cut” in two separate locations, German Transport Minister Volker Wissing told reporters Saturday afternoon local time.

Deutsche Bahn, the country’s national railway operator, said that because of the damage to the cables, “which are indispensable for train traffic, Deutsche Bahn had to stop train traffic in the north for almost three hours this morning.”

It said the incident had disabled communication with trains and stranded thousands of passengers at the start of the weekend in the states of Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. Traffic had resumed by late morning, according to the company, which warned that some disruption would persist.

France has arrested an “ultra-left activist” in connection with the railway sabotage.

French authorities have arrested an activist from an ultra-left-wing movement at a site belonging to national rail operator SNCF, days after sabotage attacks paralyzed the network at the start of the Olympic Games, a police source said Monday. The man was detained at Oissel in northern France on Sunday and had access keys to SNCF technical premises, tools and literature linked to the ultra-left, said the source, asking not to be named.

But it smells more like a scene out of Casablanca than a police operation.

Getting arrested at a rail line a couple of days after a major sabotage effort with the access keys, tools, and manuals necessary to replicate the previous day’s work doesn’t seem like the work of a supervillain.

This latest round of attacks on critical infrastructure, like the disabling of France’s high-speed rail, doesn’t seem linked to the Paris Olympics and comes without any claim of responsibility. The lack of a demand or reason essentially rules out most domestic extremist groups. It is almost as if someone was sending a warning to Paris.