Paris city rail traffic was temporarily brought to a halt and five stations evacuated evening following a CIA alert of a possible bomb attack, police said. The CIA had warned French domestic counter-intelligence of a threat to carry out an attack Thursday on either the Paris suburban rail network or the subway, they said. Traffic was temporarily halted on the A line of the Paris regional suburban rail network, the RER, which also runs through the city centre. Police evacuated the stations after the CIA informed the French of an anonymous message it had received from Madrid warning of a possible attack between 1830 and 1930 GMT. The RER stations affected included one at the Gare de Lyon mainline rail station. Police later announced they had ended the state of alert at 9:30 pm after an interruption of about one hour and a half. "Following systematic searches of stations on RER A line, the police prefecture has requested the RATP (Paris region transport authority) to resume normal traffic," a police spokesman said.
Police said the warning to the CIA came in an anonymous e-mail message from Madrid, where massive bomb attacks at rail stations left 191 people dead on March 11. A US government official confirmed Washington had passed on uncorroborated information to France concerning the threat of an attack. "The US government did pass some uncorroborated information to the French," the official told AFP. He said the information was transmitted "due to time sensitivity," despite the fact that "it wasn't necessarily verifiable at the time." He did not specify the source of the information or the precise time it was given. Paris police said Thursday's state of alert caused disruption to traffic during the rush hour. But there was no panic during a period of the day when some 40,000 commuters were using the A line running acros Paris from east to west and serving major business districts such as La Defense and the Champs-Elysees, as well as Chatelet-Les Halles, the capital's biggest urban communications hub. |