Railway workers in France rushed to wrap up delicate repair work on Saturday, a day after arsonists sabotaged three high-speed train lines and caused disruptions that have eased up but are expected to last through the weekend.
The sabotage upended travel plans for over a million end-of-week passengers and caused chaos just hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Summer Olympics on Friday.
The ceremony itself unfurled across the Seine River without any major issue other than pouring rain, allowing French security officials to breath a sigh of relief.
“WE DID IT!” Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, exulted on X, adding that “after four years of intense work to prepare for the world’s biggest sport event, we have never been prouder of our security forces.”
But the railway sabotage cast a shadow over that elation. The French authorities have said little about who might be responsible or what the exact motives were.
No arrests have been made, and no one has publicly claimed responsibility for the attacks, which hit three separate locations on France’s vast railway network around 4 a.m. on Friday: Courtalain, southwest of Paris; Pagny-sur-Moselle, to the east; and Croisilles, to the north. All are over 60 miles from the French capital.
An attack on a fourth location, in Vergigny, about 85 miles southeast of Paris, was foiled when railway workers doing maintenance work stumbled upon suspicious individuals who fled before any damage was done, the authorities said.
The arsonists simultaneously cut and burned critical signaling and security cables, bringing traffic on three high-speed train lines to a halt. They targeted signaling stations right before the tracks split into two directions, ensuring maximum disruptions.
Each cable is split into dozens or even hundreds of fiber optic threads that must be repaired, reconnected and tested.
Video released on Friday by the S.N.C.F., France’s national railway company, showed workers clad in fluorescent orange hunched over clumps of charred cables as they painstakingly replaced them.
The company said in a statement on Saturday that its employees had “worked all night under difficult conditions in the rain” to undo the damage.
Traffic was back to normal on the line that connects Paris to eastern France, the company said. Seven out of 10 trains will run on the lines that connect the French capital to the north, west and southwest of the country, with delays of up to two hours, it said.
Traffic will remain disrupted on Sunday on the northern line but should improve on the others, it added.
“All team and accredited transport for the Olympic Games will be provided,” the S.N.C.F. said.
The Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles major cases of organized crime, has opened an investigation on a range of criminal vandalism and criminal conspiracy charges that carry the risk of up to 20 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of euros in fines.
The charges, which indicate how serious the French authorities are treating the attacks, include “damage to property likely to affect the fundamental interests of the nation” and “damage and attempted damage by dangerous means in an organized gang.”
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