Trains in north Germany halted for three hours after sabotage

A train communications system in Germany was targeted by sabotage Saturday, forcing both passenger and cargo trains to halt for nearly three hours across the northwest of the country, authorities said.

Operator Deutsche Bahn said early Saturday that no long-distance or regional trains were running in the states of Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Bremen. That also affected trains between Berlin and Cologne, neither of which was directly affected by the system failure, and between Berlin and Amsterdam, while trains from Denmark weren't crossing the border into Germany.

The sabotage hit a primary mode of regional and intercity transport in Germany as well as disrupting supply lines for industries using cargo trains.

After the nearly three-hour suspension, Deutsche Bahn said the problem — a "failure of the digital train radio system" — had been resolved but that some disruptions could still be expected. It later said the outage was caused by sabotage.

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