More than 10,000 people were left stranded in Spain after cable thefts along a train route and a technical issue disrupted high-speed rail travel on Sunday and Monday, officials said.
It was the latest ordeal for Spain, which is still reeling from a power outage last week, one of the worst in recent European history. The cause of the blackout remains unclear.
Oscar Puente, the transport minister, called the thefts a “serious act of sabotage” in a social media post.
Mr. Puente said that the Spanish national police force was investigating thefts at five locations on the line between Madrid and Seville. He said those were partly responsible for widespread travel interruptions on Sunday, which is observed as Mother’s Day in Spain.
It was unclear who had stolen the cables, and why, but Mr. Puente described the episode as a theft of “low-value cable” most likely meant to cause havoc.
“Whoever did it knew what they were doing because there were no cameras, and the financial gain is absolutely negligible compared with the enormous damage,” Mr. Puente told the broadcaster Cadena Ser in Spanish on Monday morning.
“It’s a fairly coordinated action,” he told the “Today for Today” radio program.
Mr. Puente said in a post on X on Monday morning that high-speed rail service should be back to normal by the afternoon — almost a full day after the cable thefts were reported.
The cable thefts, which occurred before 6 p.m. on Sunday, were not the only reason for the disruptions, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, the president of Renfe, Spain’s national rail company, wrote on X.
Mr. Fernández Heredia also blamed a technical issue for the issues, which he said had affected more than 10,000 passengers.
After the thefts, a train also “snagged, dragging the overhead power line,” he wrote in Spanish. Train traffic was halted as the issue was resolved, he added.
The cascading challenges left travelers stranded at stations and trapped on trains for hours, just as passengers were during the widespread electricity outage last week.
“Blackouts, breakdowns,” Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the Madrid region, wrote in a post on X. “A daily calamity, international embarrassment, and damage to the economy.”
Jesús Navarro, a Spanish broadcast reporter who was traveling via train on Sunday, described his 16-hour ordeal in a social media post. For seven of those hours, he and his fellow passengers waited in “complete darkness” without water, he wrote.
“Could not eat anything until six in the morning at the cafeteria,” he wrote, adding: “Horrible.”
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