Fear that the French rail network has become a target for terrorists was raised again on Wednesday night after a track worker found an explosive device half-buried on the main line from Paris to Basle in Switzerland.
The interior ministry said the suspected bomb, contained in a transparent plastic box measuring 20cm by 20cm, did not appear to resemble those described in threats by a group called AZF, which has said it will blow up railway tracks unless it is paid a multimillion-pound ransom.
The ministry said in a brief statement that the box, found just after noon near the eastern village of Montieramay, held ”nitrate fuel, a flat battery linked to six pyrotechnic detonators … and a domestic timing device”.
One of the wires had become disconnected, the statement said.
A police source had told French radio that the device’s external appearance ”strongly resembled” a time bomb planted under a railway track near Limoges in the south-west to which AZF directed the police last month, apparently in an attempt to show it meant business.
That device, made of diesel fuel and nitrate and fitted with an advanced timer, was ”complex, efficient, and in full working order”, the ministry said at the time, and had sent a 35kg section of railway track hurtling 25 metres when it was detonated in a controlled explosion.
The previously unknown group, apparently named after a chemical factory that blew up in southern France in September 2001, has written at least three letters to the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and President Jacques Chirac warning that it has buried 10 bombs under railway tracks around France which will begin exploding unless it is paid a ransom of $4m.
The group described itself as a ”secular pressure group of a terrorist nature”.
Three government attempts to pay the ransom have failed, according to the French media, and a thorough search of all 32 800km of French railway track by 10 000 railway employees earlier this month failed to unearth any suspected bombs.
The interior ministry said on Wednesday that it had set up a crisis centre in Paris headed by officers of the serious crimes squad, the anti-terrorist police and the national police’s elite rapid intervention force.
A spokesperson for the ministry refused to speculate about who might have planted the device.
It said the device was being examined in a police laboratory to see how dangerous it really was.
The French railway company, SNCF, has been receiving up to a dozen hoax calls a day and has discovered at least three fake bombs since AZF’s threats were reported in the press.
The ministry made no mention of a possible Islamist threat, but French officials have warned in the wake of the Madrid train bombings that France is at much at risk as any other European country.
Several unauthenticated threats purporting to come from extremist Muslim groups have warned the government that it will be ”punished” for its law banning the Islamic veil in state schools. – Guardian Unlimited Â