No Evidence AgainstRailway Terrorists

Of the nine people arrested in mid-November on suspicion of causing a series of French high-speed train (TGV) accidents by sabotaging overhead electrical lines, only two remain in custody, all others having been released due to lack of evidence.

Seven of the original nine arrested had to be released after just a few days because charges of “forming a terrorist organization” and “committing life-threatening actions against public transportation” could not be proven. Before Christmas last year, a judge ordered Julien Coupat and his girlfriend Yidune Levy to be released, but at the behest of the Interior Ministry, state attorneys filed an objection and were successful in getting an extension of their pre-trial detention. The only evidence against them thus far is their presence in the vicinity of a TGV right-of-way where one of the attacks took place. This “proof” came about because police had bugged their car with a GPS tracking device several months earlier. Police, however, never witnessed any attacks nor did they have to take any action to prevent one.

The perpetrators, as yet unidentified, gained access to the tracks by sawing through a guard fence. Once inside, they placed steel rebar on the overhead power lines in such a way as to later cause several hundred meters of lines to collapse. Dozens of fast trains were delayed affecting tens of thousands of travelers. But tens of thousands of travelers had suffered similar delays in the preceding months due to the dilapidated condition of the overhead lines as well. In order to counter and deflect public anger, Minister of the Interior Michèle Alliot-Marie ordered a massive action against the suspects based on the vague GPS tracking signals that they had received. Heavily armed special troops moved into the village of Tarnac in the Corrèze mountains and, in front of TV cameras, arrested members of an “anarchist commune” lead by Julien Coupat. The Interior Ministry announced that the commune had connections with “violent, ultra-leftist organizations” in Great Britain, Belgium, Italy and Germany that had protested at the G8 summit and were active in attempting to blockade the transportation of nuclear waste. A police search found neither rebar similar to that used to sabotage the high-speed train lines nor any of the tools or technical specifications that would be necessary to carry out such acts.

The commune members supported themselves by farming and operating small businesses in the village and were very popular among the residents. They were so popular, in fact, that the townspeople immediately formed a committee to support the detained commune members. Lawyers for the defense quickly discovered that the evidence against them was shaky, at best. The most serious piece of “evidence” against Coupat and his friends the prosecution could come up with was a brochure they claimed was authored by Coupat entitled “The Coming Revolution” that justified the sabotage of public transport networks as a legitimate tactic against a reactionary government.

But that fit hand in glove with Alliot-Marie’s concept of keeping close tabs on ultra-leftist groups ordered by her immediately after she took office in 2007 as well as with her prioritization of groups such as radical Islamists, militant Corsican nationalists and Spanish ETA activists who had gone underground in France. An advisor to the Interior Minister sought to justify this attack on political opinion rather than against actual crime by saying the brochure Coupat is supposed to have written was “also the way everything began in Russia in 1917.”

But really intensive police spying on Julien Coupat and his girlfriend didn’t actually start until April, 2008 after security agencies in the United States forwarded a report to French authorities advising Coupat had taken part in a public demonstration at a U.S. Army recruiting station in New York. The American authorities were unable to report anything negative about Coupat’s girlfriend Yidune who was visiting a New York museum at the time in question.