France leaning towards far-left suspects behind rail sabotage, minister says

PARIS (Reuters) -France is leaning towards the likelihood that far-left extremists were behind last week's sabotage of the country's SNCF rail network - which coincided with the Olympic Games opening ceremony, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.

Saboteurs struck France's high-speed train network on Friday with pre-dawn attacks on signal substations and cables at critical points, causing travel chaos hours before the opening ceremony.

"We have identified the profiles of several people," Darmanin told France 2 TV, regarding the hunt for those saboteurs. He added that the saboteurs' mode of operation bore the hallmarks of far-left extremists, without providing examples.

All trains were back up and running by Monday morning after teams worked around the clock over the weekend to fix the damage, Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete said on RTL radio.

Overall 800,000 people faced travel disruptions because of the attacks, including 100,000 people whose trains had to be cancelled outright, he said, adding the cost to the state-owned rail operator SNCF would be considerable.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Benoit Van Overstraeten; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Sharon Singleton)