After French Rail Sabotage, Some See Signs of a Murky ‘Ultraleft’

Who sabotaged France’s high-speed train lines last month?

Clear answers to that question have been elusive so far, more than a week after coordinated arson attacks that disrupted rail travel for hundreds of thousands of travelers before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

There have been no arrests, and no suspects have been publicly identified. For now, the country appears far more invested in its Olympic medal count than in the outcome of the investigation. That is probably a good thing for the authorities, because such cases, though not uncommon, are notoriously difficult to solve.

Officials are not ruling out any possibilities, including foreign interference. But much suspicion has fallen on what French authorities label as “ultraleft,” anticapitalist groups that are less interested in gaining notoriety for their actions than in disrupting the workings of the state.

Railway sabotage is a “traditional method of action” for such groups, Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said in the aftermath of the attacks.

France’s domestic intelligence agency also has said that arson has been “a preferred modus operandi” for the “ultraleft” movement, “which regularly launches campaigns aimed mainly at energy and telecommunications infrastructures.”

But in France and elsewhere in Europe, “the number of arrests for left-wing and anarchist terrorist and extremist offenses is generally not very high,” Europol, the European Union agency for law enforcement cooperation, said in a report last year.