France Closes Rail Line After CIA Tip

A tip from the CIA about a potential terrorist attack caused police Thursday to shut down and search a commuter train line that runs through the heart of Paris, French authorities said.

The search Thursday evening on a suburban network known as the RER turned up nothing, a police spokesman said. Service was restored after about an hour and a half, but special patrols continued.

“It’s a routine security operation,” the spokesman said. “There is nothing of a grave or imminent nature.”

The alert resulted from a warning from CIA officials in Spain, where bombings aboard commuter trains in Madrid last month killed 191 people, French authorities said.

“I can tell you that the information came from the CIA in Spain,” said a spokeswoman for the French Interior Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In Madrid, an official at the U.S. Embassy declined to comment, citing the policy of not discussing intelligence matters.

The decision of the French government to identify the CIA as the source of the warning was unusual, and it seemed to add urgency to the decision to shut down the RER-A line. Foreign governments tend to refrain from mentioning the CIA by name in such cases.

The March 11 bombings in Madrid have left Europe on high alert for attacks during the Easter season, a particularly dangerous time because Islamic terrorists have sought to use religious symbolism.

Several suspects in the bombings remain at large. The Moroccan-dominated network implicated in the case has a presence in France. On Monday, French police arrested 13 suspected extremists. Several of them are alleged to have ties to Moroccans connected to the Madrid attacks and to suicide bombings last year in Casablanca.

Weeks before the Madrid bombings, French police made a mass deployment of security forces on the nation’s railroad system after a mysterious group threatened to blow up trains if it was not paid a ransom. The forces found an explosive device beneath train tracks last month and believed it was the work of that group, which is not believed to have ties to Islamic terrorism.

Despite diplomatic tensions over Iraq, U.S. and French counter-terrorism services work closely together. The decision to cite the U.S. agency might have been an effort to make the alert more credible in the eyes of the public. There were grumblings in France during the Christmas holidays when Washington pressured France to cancel a number of flights bound for the United States because of a terrorism threat that, as far as French investigators were concerned, appeared to have been a false alarm.