Category Archives: Sabotage, Arsons Attacks

Munich (Germany): sabotaging the concrete industry…

Around 3 a.m. on Sunday night, September 2, employees of a small company called the fire department to report a fire at their neighbor’s premises. Their neighbor, in the Detmoldstraße industrial park to the north of Munich, is none other than a huge factory: the Max Bögl Concrete Plant, which has been covering the world in its filth since 1929 and, according to its own figures, employs 6,500 people at 40 sites worldwide.

On site, the firefighters were quickly dismayed. The flames were engulfing the production site in various places. On one side, six concrete transport trucks were ablaze, on the other an excavator, and finally, high in the sky, the company’s conveyor belt lit up the night. Despite the general alarm sounded by the first firefighters, who were joined by some fifty colleagues, the fire continued to spread, and the conveyor belt fire eventually reached the top of the mixing silo, starting to eat away at it, at the same time as several blocks of compressed cardboard from a nearby waste disposal site began to smell a bit scorched. It wasn’t until 6.30 a.m. that the sabotage against the concrete plant, which caused millions of euros worth of damage, was finally extinguished.

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On SNCF’s post-sabotage surveillance systems (France)

Sabotage: SNCF takes action to prevent further attacks on the rail network

Le Figaro, September 9, 2024

The sabotage against the railroad tracks on the night before the Olympic Games opening ceremony on July 26 has left its mark on the SNCF. Officially, the rail company prefers to highlight its handling of this XXL attack: within three days, all train traffic had been restored. “435 agents worked 3×8 for three days. The speed with which we were able to return to normal shows the resilience of our network in the face of a very large-scale attack”, says Damien Pallant, Deputy Director General of Safety at SNCF Réseau, which is responsible for France’s railroads. The general public has discovered the fragility of the French network. And, away from the microphones, tongues are wagging within the state-owned company: “We were stunned that several axes of our network were under attack at the same time,” says one of its executives.

A fortnight earlier, the group’s CEO Jean-Pierre Farandou had seemed confident during his visit to the SNCF Réseau Île-de-France supervision center. The head of this operations center, nestled somewhere in the Gare du Nord, had presented him with a reassuring system where 25 people working in 3×8 shifts, 7 days a week, monitored the state of the network on computer screens. With 50% of equipment fitted with sensors (rails, catenaries, etc.), they were immediately informed of any faults. And that’s not even mentioning the measures intended to thwart malicious acts on these installations. For this, SNCF Réseau felt it was already doing a great deal: anti-intrusion devices on signal boxes, protected electrical transformers…
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Sardinia (Italy): green capitalism under fire again

On September 9, on the occasion of attacks on industrial wind turbines in Mamoiada and Villacidro, we published a short summary of mobilizations against “energy speculation” in Sardinia, with some details about the two sabotages at the end of August.

As it happens, the series didn’t stop there, as a third occurred shortly afterwards against one of the countless “green” nuisances being installed on the island. On the night of Monday to Tuesday, September 11, at around 4 a.m., in the Garganu area near Tuili in the south of the territory, two thousand photovoltaic panels were completely destroyed after being sprayed with petrol and then set alight. The panels had been stored at the site for use by Polish energy multinational Greenvolt Power.


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Sardinia (Italy): the price of green capitalism

In Sardinia, as in many other parts of Europe, energy projects to feed green capitalism have been proliferating for several years. In these sunny and seaside regions, already infested by mass tourism, these are mainly solar and wind farms.

On this Mediterranean island off the coast of Corsica, monsters of steel and cement must be built at all costs, even if it means uprooting olive, apricot and almond trees by force, to be replaced by huge industrial wind turbines with masts up to 200 meters high. Nearly 800 new “renewable energy production” projects are officially being studied, some of which are symbolic of all the others, such as that of the Chinese multinational Chint, which in April 2024 purchased over a thousand hectares in the north of the island (at Nurra), in order to build the largest solar farm ever conceived in Europe. Faced with growing citizen protests, ranging from local committee demonstrations to picketing the port of Oristano in an attempt to block the arrival of a shipment of wind masts, and arguing in particular for the landscape and the fact that Sardinia cannot continue to be ravaged in this way just to export so-called “green” energy to the mainland, the region’s president soon found herself faced with a dilemma.
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Munich (Germany): the rail-mounted factory didn’t make it through the night

Some don’t appreciate anonymous attacks on power, to say the least. On one side are the narrow-minded of the revolutionary movement, who see nothing but “recuperation” when comrades highlight and defend acts that speak to them. At the opposite end of the spectrum, for example, are the Munich cops, who in 2023 had to set up a special investigation group called “Raute”, under the State Protection Service (Staatsschutz), to try and solve some 30 arson attacks that left no textual clues. These included sabotage of communications, energy, logistics and war infrastructures*, two of which were the subject of raids by German police on comrades in Brussels and Amsterdam last May

After a few months’ respite, the lackeys of Bavaria’s good order were hoping to finally bask in the summer sun, if not for the return of the ghosts that haunt their sleepless nights. In Oberhaching, a small village to the south of Munich, a 200-meter-long ballast cleaner machine was parked to replace the track ballast between the S-Bahn (suburban railway) stations of Deisenhofen and Solln. A fine civilizational undertaking that was ruined at around 4am on Wednesday July 31, when several incendiary devices were judiciously placed to devour it in flames. The damage caused by the sabotage is estimated at around 500,000 euros, or “a six-figure sum in the middle of the range”, as they say in the bureaucratic language of uniforms. Not least because the expensive steel snake consisting of two excavation chains and three screen systems is now out of action, and part of it had to be dismantled on site.


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electric charging stations sabotaged around Amsterdam (Netherlands)

September 2024

As the impacts of climate change become ever more apparent capitalism seeks to rebrand itself as green. We are told that if we calculate our personal co2 footprint, buy the right (expensive) products, and do our part to recycle we can save the planet. This is categorically false. There is no way to consume our way out of this crisis. Nothing less than a fundamental shift away from the endless growth that capitalism requires can stop the glaciers from melting, the forests from burning, and the displacement of humans and animals from their habitats.

The shift to electric vehicles that is being promoted by governments across Europe and the car companies that these states subsidize is part of this thinly veiled attempt to recuperate the climate catastrophe called capitalism. There is nothing sustainable about an electric car. Every step in the global supply chain that ships an electric vehicle made in the United States to our doorstep in Amsterdam involves the exploitation of workers and the destruction of the planet. The mining of minerals for the battery alone is an incredibly destructive process. Lithium extracted in Chile contaminates local water sources, cobalt mined in the Congo involves child labor, and nickel dug out in Indonesia leaches heavy metals into the ocean. Not to mention the steel, titanium, aluminum, and plastic needed for the body of the car. These raw materials are in short supply and the scramble by states and corporations to secure access is fueling a new wave of colonialism across the global south.
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Police news on the investigation into sabotage against the Olympics (France)

[Everyone knows that the major international news agencies are linked to states, and in particular to their intelligence services. And Reuters, founded in London in 1851 and once again one of the giants of the market since its takeover by the Canadian group Thomson in 2007, is no exception to the rule. With this in mind, yesterday it released a long “exclusive” dispatch that lifts a small corner of the veil on the investigation into the sabotage of the opening of the Paris Olympic Games. Entitled “Exclusive: France seeks FBI help in probe of high-speed train sabotage hours before Olympics”, we thought this Reuters document drawn from North American sources might be of interest to curious readers.]

PARIS, Aug 7 (Reuters) – Police in France investigating the sabotage of high-speed rail lines hours before the Paris Olympics’ Opening Ceremony have asked the U.S. FBI for help, two sources with direct knowledge of the French inquiry said.

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Suspected arson at Atlanta construction site of Brent Scarborough and Company, Inc. (USA)

Law enforcement agencies are investigating a suspected arson in Atlanta early Wednesday at a construction site of a company previously targeted in similar incidents over its role in the building of the police and fire training facility that has faced a long-running protest and opposition movement.

It happened at a cleared lot on Memorial Drive next to new apartments as part of what appears to be a construction project.

Wednesday’s suspected arson follows on several other incidents that have targeted construction sites over connections to the building of the public safety training center.
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Saint-Amand-sur-Ornain (Meuse) France : Railroad sabotage – TRAIN TO NOWHERE

 Railroad sabotage – TRAIN TO NOWHERE

(Indymedia Lille 9th of August)

Over the summer, we bent a rail with a hydraulic bottle jack on the old railroad line between Nançois-Tronville and Gondrecourt-le-Château. We chose to operate precisely between Tréveray and Saint-Amand-sur-Ornain, not far from the field where the Burelesques festival of resistance to Cigéo will be held from August 16 to 18.

In a few years’ time, the SNCF plans to put these rails back into service to transport the nuclear waste that the French government would like to bury at Bure. Public consultations were held in 2022 on this rail project, and SNCF subcontractors have since begun measuring the route. This would involve 36 km of rehabilitated former railroad line, running right through the middle of villages (perhaps foreshadowing a future stage of expropriations in a few years’ time?). ANDRA also envisions the convoy of six 100-meter-long radioactive trains at 40 km/h per month for 100 years.
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Mettmann (Germany): sabotage of rail traffic

[The claim for this fire on railway signal cables in Mettmann, in the district of Düsseldorf (North Rhine-Westphalia), was written in rhyme, which we have not attempted to render. Incidentally, this same group, the “Commando Angry Birds”, had already carried out several sabotages against rail traffic: one in Düsseldorf in January 2024, and five others in Düsseldorf, claimed in May 2023

[Switch off] Communiqué no. 3 – Rail sabotage

Silence falls over the forest, the tawny owl raises its voice,
/ a train whirrs from left to right, making him lose his senses completely.

“What’s all this noise doing here at night? You’ve gone crazy!” / Let’s forgive the owl this language, it’s affecting him personally…
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