Russia will be the lead suspect in Friday morning’s attacks on the French rail network, as suspicions swirl that Vladimir Putin has been yearning for a chance to humiliate Emmanuel Macron.
French authorities had laid on a massive, high-tech security regime to defend the Olympics, with Reaper drones in the skies and AI-powered cameras on the ground to keep an eye out for any suspicious activity.
But Friday’s attack suggests they paid far less attention to key rail routes, which were sabotaged by old-fashioned arson rather than cyber-attacks, according to the latest reports.
There have been five incidents of damage to the SNCF rail network, all of them targeting electronic or signalling boxes.
The result was around 50 per cent of the trains in the north and east of France were not running as of Friday morning, while the high-speed TVG network was also paralysed.