German police were on Sunday probing an act of “sabotage” on the country’s rail infrastructure, with some officials pointing the finger at Russia in the wake of the Nord Stream pipeline explosions.
Important communications cables were cut at two sites on Saturday, forcing rail services in the north to be halted for three hours and causing travel chaos for thousands of passengers.
Rail operator Deutsche Bahn blamed the travel disruptions on “sabotage”, while Transport Minister Volker Wissing spoke of “a targeted and deliberate action”.
Germany’s top-selling daily Bild cited an internal document from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) as saying, in an early analysis of the incident, that an act of “state-ordered sabotage would be conceivable”.
The document pointed to the “widely separated crime scenes” where the cables were severed, in Herne in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and in Berlin in the east, some 540 kilometres (335 miles) away. The pipeline sabotage further raised tensions between Russia and the West, already sky-high over the Ukraine war, but Moscow denies any involvement in the blasts.
Credit: rfi
