Far-left anarchists have taken credit for an attack on German railways that took place on Friday, September 8th, as three fires broke out on power lines of the Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national rail company, in the area around the city of Hamburg, leading to the cancellation of all service between Hamburg and Berlin until Saturday.
According to a report from the German tabloid Bild, the suspects managed to enter an isolated area not open to the public and set cables on fire after opening a cable duct.
Far-left extremists later took responsibility for the attack on the web platform Indymedia, which has a long history of being linked to Antifa and other radical anarchist groups, with the German-language “Linksunten” site being shut down by the German government in 2017.
The site was known as a place where far-left extremists often took credit for acts of violence and contained posts showing readers how to construct Molotov cocktails and other weapons.
The far-left radicals explained that the Hamburg rail attack was in response to “colonial exploitation” and wrote that “Hamburg is a capitalist metropolis,” adding, “If we want to abolish capitalism, why not start here, with the infrastructure that supports it?”
Deutsche Bahn’s head of corporate security condemned the attacks, saying, “People who want to travel with us—with one of the most climate-friendly means of transport—
are massively affected by train cancellations and delays and do not reach their destinations. We are in close contact with the security authorities and hope for quick successes in the investigation.”
German Transport Minister Volker Wissing went even further, calling the incident a “form of terrorism.”
“We can only speak of luck that no one has suffered physical harm,” he said, adding, “I expect the rule of law to take consistent action here. The social consensus must be that we outlaw all violence and extremism.”
While far-left extremists took credit for the attacks, Germany’s state security police have yet to confirm the authenticity of the post but do believe the incident was politically motivated.
The attack is just the latest on infrastructure in Europe to be claimed by far-left radicals in recent years, as railway and telecommunications infrastructure have become favoured targets of anarchist groups.
In 2019, far-left anarchists were suspected of sabotaging train lines just outside of Florence, Italy, in the town of Rovezzano, also involving arson. A far-left extremist website commented on the act of sabotage, leading to speculation that anarchists were behind the attack as the incident was referred to as “a gesture of love and anger.”
In France, far-left anarchists have largely targeted telecommunications infrastructure in recent years. In 2019, an arson attack against French broadcaster France Bleu destroyed the company’s offices in Isere and came after another arson attack on a radio transmitter in Grenoble just days prior. The attack was claimed on a known anarchist website.
A year later, in 2020, an act of deliberate sabotage led to 50,000 people having their internet shut down in the Ile-de-France region, which includes the French capital Paris, with some estimating the damage cost as much as €1 million to fix.
While the sabotage was not directly linked to far-left extremists, it came during a wave of similar attacks, many of which were suspected of being linked to anarchist extremists by the French Central Territorial Intelligence Service (SCRT).
Germany’s far-left scene, in particular, is known across Europe as one of the largest and has become increasingly willing to use violence in recent years.
A 2020 report from the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) sounded alarms regarding growing violence among the far Left, stating that terrorist actions, including killings, were no longer unthinkable.
