Repairs to French railway tracks completed after arson attacks

The French national railway company said it had completed repairs to infrastructure damaged in a suspected coordinated arson attack on Friday.

The state-owned train operator SNCF said that most trains ran as planned on Sunday and that full service would resume on Monday.

Police are still searching for the perpetrators behind the incident, which French ministers and officials described as “sabotage” and which aimed to paralyze the TGV high-speed lines to and from Paris.

Hundreds of thousands of people were affected by the resulting disruptions just hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in the capital.

According to SNCF, employees worked around the clock to manually repair the fiber optic cables affected on the North, Brittany and Southwest routes.

Railway workers thwarted an attempt to destroy safety equipment on a fourth line.

On Sunday, the railway company announced that operations on the main western route from Paris were almost normal, while on the northern route from Lille, three out of four TGV trains were running and no delays were expected.

According to the SNCF, around 250,000 passengers were affected on Friday, while Deputy Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete estimated that up to 800,000 people could be affected within three days.

Eurostar, which offers international connections from London to Paris and uses a high-speed line in France, was also affected. The train will not run at the weekend, it said.

Among those affected by the disruption on Friday was Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who planned to travel by train to the Games’ opening ceremony but had to switch to a plane instead.

He told the BBC: “I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t frustrating, because it was, and for a lot of people it made travelling a lot more difficult.”

The Paris public prosecutor’s office has launched a criminal investigation into the incidents, led by the competent authority for organized crime.