11:33 PM
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Paris – (AFP)
A crowded Paris train station witnessed an almost complete halt to traffic on Tuesday, after an arson fire disrupted the work of the directing center for trains heading to the east of the French capital.
France’s national railway company SNCF said train traffic from the Gare de l’Est station, which runs to eastern France and Germany as well as to the eastern suburbs of Paris, was halted all day except for a few local services.
It is highly unusual for a major Paris station to shut down for an entire day, and the normally bustling platforms were eerily quiet on Tuesday afternoon.
The company said operations would remain disrupted Wednesday and only one in three high-speed TGV trains would depart.
The fire broke out at a train routing center just before the morning rush hour. The company said it initially thought it was an accident, but it later turned out to be arson. “This is a deliberate fire,” a spokeswoman for the company told AFP.
The company has filed a criminal complaint with the police and the identity of the perpetrators or their intent to target a small but important part of the infrastructure has yet to be established.
Transport Minister Clement Bonn said 48 cable assemblies comprising 600 individual electric cables had been destroyed. “Last night, he committed an act of blatant sabotage,” he told reporters at the station. He added that while vandalism can be frequent, this incident was “something very extraordinary”.
The prosecutor of the town of Meaux, east of Paris, said it had launched a criminal investigation against unknown persons for intentionally causing harm and endangering the lives of others.
Gare de l’Est is the fifth busiest railway station in the French capital and was used by about 28 million people last year.
The disruption also comes at a time when workers in the railway sector are preparing to carry out a series of strikes as an expression of the unions’ protest against amending the pension system that the government is planning.
He announced another national strike on January 31, after a massive strike on the 19th of this month. Unions said Tuesday that railway workers would also strike on February 7 and 8.
