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People waiting at a station after a significant power outage was reported by local authorities in Alpes-Maritimes in France on Saturday, May 24. (Mohamad Salaheldin Abdelg Alsayed/Anadolu/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
By Catherine Nicholls, CNN
(CNN) — Nearly 45,000 people suffered a power outage in and around Nice, southern France, on Sunday, after an electrical transformer was set on fire overnight, according to the city’s mayor.
The outage came less than a day after another major power cut left around 160,000 homes across the region without electricity and impacted the nearby town of Cannes, which was hosting its annual international film festival.
Two self-proclaimed “bands of anarchists” have jointly claimed responsibility for the power cuts, saying that they carried out deliberate acts of sabotage on electrical infrastructure not only to disrupt the Cannes Film Festival, but also to cut off power to a nearby aerospace company, Cannes airport, and “other industrial, military, and technological establishments in the area.”
The claim, made in a statement posted to an activist network on Sunday, cannot be independently verified by CNN. French public broadcaster FranceInfo reported that the anarchists’ claim was being looked into by prosecutors, although no formal link between the attacks has been established yet.
The mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, said in a post on X Sunday morning local time that both national and municipal police were mobilized in relation to the electrical transformer that was set on fire. Images from Nice’s monitoring center will be made available to investigators, he said, adding: “I strongly denounce these malicious acts that affect our country.”
The day before the outage in Nice, the Alpes-Maritimes area, where the resort town of Cannes is located, suffered a power cut from around 10 a.m. local time (4 a.m. ET) to 4:30 p.m. local time (10:30 a.m. ET), according to France’s electricity transmission network RTE.
Officials had already suggested that the outage was caused deliberately.
Sébastien Leroy, the mayor of Mandelieu-La Napoule, a commune just south-west of Cannes, said in a Facebook post Saturday that it looked like the power cut was caused by a “double act of sabotage.”
A fire broke out at an electrical substation in the nearby commune of Tanneron around 4:30 a.m. local time Saturday (10:30 p.m. Friday ET), and later in the morning, an electricity pylon suffered “major damage,” according to a statement released by the Alpes-Maritimes local government.
Laurent Hottiaux, prefect of Alpes-Maritimes, condemned “these serious acts of damage” in “the strongest terms,” the statement said.
Saturday was the last day of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which has been held in the town for 78 years. The closing ceremony, which saw the winners of the festival’s top prizes announced, took place in the evening.
The festival used generators to ensure that screenings were still able to go ahead, FranceInfo reported.
The Palais des Festivals, where Cannes’ main events take place, “switched to an independent power supply, allowing all scheduled events and screenings, including the closing ceremony, to proceed as planned and under normal conditions,” the festival said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The outage affected two screenings on Saturday morning for about five minutes, then they resumed, the organizers said, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
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