Far-left anarchists have claimed responsibility for sabotage attacks on electrical systems and causing power outages in Southern France over the weekend, including at the Cannes Film Festival.
Posting on the far-left online platform IndyMedia, an anonymous group of anarcho-radicals claimed to have sabotaged key electrical infrastructure over the weekend, which left around 160,00 people without power in the Alpes-Maritimes department and around 45,000 in Nice.
The suspected sabotage attacks began in the late hours of Friday evening and continued through Sunday, briefly impacting the closing of the Cannes Film Festival, which the leftist arsonists branded an “obscene ceremony by a sea that has become a refugee cemetery.” However, the event organisers were able to run the programme off backup generators, and therefore, the finale was ultimately uninterrupted.
The supposed saboteurs, who described themselves as “two bands of anarchists”, said that their intention was to both interrupt the film festival as well as shut off power to Thales Alenia Space and other French defence contractors in the region, which they accused of fostering a world which “will not stop bombing, exploiting, extracting, grabbing, raping, ravaging, starving, machine-gunning, polluting, and exterminating, until everything is under its control.”
They accused the French government of being hypocritical, saying that while it preaches the principles of “progress on the international scene,” it is the second-largest arms exporter in the world behind the United States.
“French excellence in this area arms NATO and sows death, from Yemen to Gaza, from Ukraine to the Sahel,” they said, adding that the defence firms in the Cannes region employ thousands of engineers and technicians who “work there daily to develop these military (observation, communication, missile and drone guidance) and civilian (telecommunications, surveillance) satellites.”
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