France suspects leftists in rail attacks as telecoms networks hit

By Gabriel Stargardter and Leigh Thomas

PARIS (Reuters) -Vandals sabotaged France's telecoms networks overnight, piling pressure on French security services trying to secure the Olympics after authorities said they suspected left-wing groups of attacking rail lines ahead of the opening ceremony in Paris.

The cuts to long distance telecoms cables at five sites early on Monday "look like sabotage", Romain Bonenfant, general director of the French Telecoms Federation, told Reuters.

"It was an operation that was prepared. If it wasn't people who work for (us), it was people who had information."

Police have yet to arrest anyone for Friday's attacks on high-speed rail lines with explosive devices, but Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Monday authorities suspected members of far-left militant groups due to the nature of the sabotage.

"We have identified the profiles of several people," Darmanin told France 2 TV.

Paris police chief Laurent Nunez declined to say whether there was any link between the telecoms and rail attacks.

"There is a modus operandi in that first attack that makes you think of the far-left," he told reporters.

However, like the rail attacks investigation, the Paris prosecutors office said the telecoms probe would be overseen by its organised crime office, with the anti-terrorist sub-directorate (SDAT), a branch of the judicial police that typically monitors far-left, far-right and radical environmental groups, coordinating investigations.

French telecoms regulator Arcep said the sabotage of telecom networks affected 11,000 people, mainly customers of the SFR and Free services.

A spokesperson for SFR said the impact was minimal because the network was designed to reroute traffic. Free said some of its services had been affected by "a multi-operator network incident" in six different departments across France.

"Since 2.15 a.m. our national network is experiencing significant slowdown," Free said on X. "All our services are provided, sometimes with a degradation in quality of service."

LEFTISTS SUSPECTED

In recent years, France has mainly been targeted in attacks by Islamist militants, but security services have been increasingly concerned about far-left or anarchist groups, which typically oppose the state and capitalism.

The then-head of France's domestic intelligence agency, Nicolas Lerner, told Le Monde newspaper last year President Emmanuel Macron's divisive 2023 pension shake-up had helped lure recruits to far-left groups, which have increasingly added environmental issues to their ideologies.

"In recent years, the far-left movements have been known for particularly violent clandestine actions, including arson campaigns ... ransacking and destruction of property," Lerner, who now leads the foreign spy agency, said in the interview.

In a 2023 report on terrorism trends, European police agency Europol said left-wing and anarchist groups typically attacked "critical infrastructure, such as repeaters and antennas, government institutions and private companies" with their "most common modus operandi" being arson and explosive devices.

Train services in France were back up and running by early Monday after teams worked around the clock at the weekend to fix the damage, Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete told RTL radio.

He said 800,000 people had faced travel disruptions and said the cost to the state-owned rail operator SNCF would be considerable.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Leigh Thomas; additional reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Writing by Charlotte Van Campenhout, Editing by Andrew Heavens and Ros Russell)