Quotes of the Day

The French love their trains, but were boarding them warily after bomb threats to the country's rail system. The government confirmed that its security forces have for the past three months played a cat-and-mouse game with a group calling itself AZF that has threatened to bomb the railroads — and two other unidentified targets — unless it is paid a hefty ransom. Officials were instructed to communicate with the group via personal ads in a newspaper, using the code name "Big Wolf" for AZF and "Suzy" for the Interior Ministry. A day after one such ad was posted, they received the GPS coordinates of a sophisticated bomb planted along a line in central France, which ballistics experts detonated.

Last week French officials tried to deliver the equivalent of €4.2 million AZF had demanded in exchange for the location of other bombs, but failed to find the drop point — a field 105 km south of Paris. As a result, they dispatched 10,000 workers to inspect 32,000 km of tracks. They found nothing. "We're still taking this extremely seriously because we know these people are very organized and intelligent," says a security official. He says AZF's missives suggest it is an "extreme leftist, perhaps anarchist" group but stops short of calling it a terrorist outfit. "This seems like a new form of high-stakes extortion," he says.

• BRUCE CRUMLEY
• Is France's beloved rail system the terrorists' next target?