A far-left activist was arrested on Monday for his alleged links to the sabotage of France’s high-speed rail network Last Friday, according to the Interior Minister’s report on Monday, Gerald DarmaninThis is the first arrest announced since the attack, which took place on Friday, hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games began.

The circulation of high-speed trains (TGV) in France has returned to total normality this Monday after the sabotage they suffered on Friday, the day of the inauguration ceremony of the Paris Olympicsthree of the major runners in an action whose authorship points to the far left, after the identification of certain profiles.

“We have identified a a certain number of people profiles who could have committed the attacks, which occurred in very precise places “to paralyse the operation of the TGVs,” explained the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. In an interview with public television France 2, Darmanin said that the type of sabotage action that was carried out “is the traditional mode of action of the extreme left.”

Asked whether it was a terrorist act, he recalled that the competent authority to classify it as such is the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT), which has not yet decided to take over the investigation, which is in the hands of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office. In his case, the minister specified that he “I wouldn’t classify it” as terrorismbut rather an “act of sabotage.”

The head of Transport, Patrice Vergrietestressed on Monday that “all trains” on the high-speed lines are running “normally” again, in another interview with the RTL radio station. Vergriete said that normality has been fully restored not only in the Eastern corridor (from Paris towards Luxembourg and Strasbourg), where this had already been the case since Saturday, when all the repairs were made, but also in the Northern and Atlantic corridors.

On the Northern axis (from Paris to Lille, London, Brussels, the Netherlands and northern Germany), 75% of the usual trains were in service on Sunday. On the Atlantic axis, which runs from Paris to Brittany and to destinations in the south-west such as Bordeaux, Toulouse and the Basque Country, the situation was “almost normal” since Sunday.

On Friday morning, three signalling installations on three of the four main TGV routes in France were the target of coordinated criminal arson attacks, just hours before the opening of the Paris Olympic Games. There was also an attempt on the fourth major corridor (the South-East corridor, from Paris to Lyon, Marseille or Barcelona) which was aborted when SNCF employees surprised a group of individuals who fled in a van while trying to set fire to another signalling equipment.

As a result of this action, only on Friday they had to cancel 200 of the 750 TGVsVergriete said on Monday that a total of 100,000 people were prevented from travelling by train over the weekend due to the sabotage.