PARIS: Dozens of people have been arrested in France for wanting to disrupt the Olympic Games, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on Monday, the German Press Agency (dpa) reported.
Security forces arrested nearly 50 people, Darmanin told the France 2 television channel. They had wanted to carry out “sabotage actions or radical protests” during the first Olympic competitions, but authorities prevented this, he said.
The newspaper Le Parisien reported that 45 members of the radical environmental movement Extinction Rebellion had been arrested. They had planned actions to protest against the social and ecological consequences of the Olympics.
The newspaper Le Figaro reported that an ultra-left-wing activist was arrested on Sunday in Oissel, about 121 kilometres north-west of Paris.
The man was arrested at a French national train or SNCF location and had “access keys to SNCF technical premises” along with “wire cutters [and a] set of universal keys” in his vehicle along with literature linked to the ultra-left, the story said.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said that this arrest was not connected to the investigtion into the arson attacks that disrupted traffic on Friday hours ahead of the Olympics’ opening ceremonies, affecting hundreds of thousands of travellers. No arrests have been made yet in that incident, the office said.
Darmanin also told France 2 that his office has a clearer picture of who may be behind those attacks.
“We have identified a number of profiles of individuals who may have carried out these very deliberate and highly targeted acts of sabotage,“ he said. – Bernama, dpa
