Police are investigating a potential case of infrastructure sabotage that shut down railways in the Netherlands as the landmark NATO Summit kicks off Tuesday morning in The Hague, the Dutch seat of government.
A fire among underground cables knocked out rail transport around main national airport Schiphol, the Dutch capital Amsterdam, and the seat of government The Hague on Tuesday just as the eyes of the world turned on the Netherlands for a landmark NATO conference that is set to see the alliance agree a considerable step-change in military spending.
Speaking from the NATO summit, the Dutch Minister of Justice David van Weel said the cause of the blaze had not yet been determined but given the conspicuous timing of having swathes of the country’s public transport wiped out of seriously reduced in capacity, he said sabotage could not be ruled out. The Minister told Dutch broadcaster NOS of the sabotage theory: “That is one of the things we are investigating… Then the question is: who is behind it? It could be an activist group, it could be another country. It could be anything.
“The most important thing now is to repair the cables and get the traffic moving again”. As well as a spontaneous blaze among the trunking which, the railway company reported, damaged 30 cables, or sabotage by a state or group, the minister also said it was possible it could have been a case of cable theft for the valuable copper inside gone wrong.
Haarlems Dagblad further reports a police source who said they “strongly suspect” the act against the railway was deliberate, saying “traces had been found” at the scene.
On Monday there were also arrests on the road out of Schiphol airport of Extinction Rebellion protesters expressing their views against NATO.
France Points Finger at Ultra-Left Anarchists for Major Olympics Rail Sabotage https://t.co/t5cvVGokzU
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 29, 2024
Per Algemeen Dagblad Tuesday’s fire, which started around 0345 and knocked out power to sections of the railway around Schiphol airport, was extinguished quickly but repairing the damage and then getting the railway restarted is expected to take the rest of the day. Information to travellers states not to expect any trains from the airport until nearly midnight tonight.
Hundreds of people were stranded by the railway lines being knocked out, with the airport laying on extra bus services to rescue travellers. Several roads around The Hague were already closed and diverted today for security reasons to protect the NATO summit, intensifying issues. The Dutch infrastructure ministry told those who could to work from home today.
Burning railway cables which disrupts power and signalling — and without computer-controlled signals, modern railways cannot operate at all — is already a well known tactic of the hard-left and was seen recently on the opening day of the Paris Olympics. Direct action anarchists burnt out cables at strategic locations around Paris the morning of the opening ceremony, paralysing all routes in and out of the city.
At that time a spokesman for the French government had said evidence left behind quickly pointed to the “ultra-left” and that the strike had been “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted… the traditional type of action of the ultra left”.
While all eyes were initially on Russia, the hard-left has been sabotaging railways, data, and power just like this across Europe for years, fighting what they call "this technological hell". Police are now considering the ultra-left as potential suspects: https://t.co/Enzi1mfZGf
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 10, 2022
Just last week, ultra-left direct action members burned out dozens of telecoms company and Amazon delivery trucks in Berlin in protest against those businesses supporting Israel, just the latest such burnings in a matter of months. Beyond the Paris Olympics in 2022 an attack in Germany saw cables controlling safety-critical equipment and backhaul communications cut by saboteurs with “very precise” knowledge of how the system worked.
In 2019, power cables for high-speed trains were sabotaged in Italy, with the attack coinciding with a court ruling on a left-wing group said to have bombed a book shop. In countless other cases non-railway infrastructure including radio transmitters, internet and telephone cables, mobile data towers, a power station and power lines have been struck across Europe for what are thought to be political reasons.
More recently a new dimension has emerged with accusations of sabotage — quite often arson — perpetrated by Russian agents or their paid proxies. Among the alleged targets have been military bases, warehouses, aircraft, and undersea data cables.
