The Spanish transport minister said the country's railway network suffered "severe wreak havoc" after the busy bank holiday weekend, which caused serious delays to high-speed service between Madrid and Sevilla, which affected more than 10,000 travelers.

Renfe, the country's state-owned railway operator, said the problem between the capital and southern Andalusia was due to the stolen cables from four different locations in the Toledo region in southern Madrid late Sunday.

When Renfe and railway infrastructure company Adif were eager to resume services, Spanish transport minister Óscar Puente said: "We have suffered serious damage on the highway line between Madrid and Seville."

Puente said in a radio interview Monday morning that the network appears to have been purposely targeted. "It's a low-value burglary," he told Cadena Ser. "Whoever knows what they're doing because there's no camera and the economic benefits are absolutely negligible compared to the huge damage."

The minister said he believed the incident was "damage" rather than a burglary, adding that it involved 150 meters of cable.

Renfe President Álvaro Fernández Heredia said he also felt theft was suspicious.

He told state-owned radio station DeEspaña that stealing wired cables from four different angles and two directions was not great. "It's weird, I'm sure the Transportation Department and the police will investigate this because we haven't seen it until now. ”

When asked if he shared Puente's argument that it was a case of destruction: "I do...theft of the signal cables on which the security infrastructure relies on is destruction, even if it's just a simple theft because it's an attack on the infrastructure itself."

By 9:30 a.m. Monday, Renfe and Adif said the Madrid-Seville line was running again, hoping that the service would return to normal throughout the day.

By early Monday morning, Alberto Valero and his family visited Spain from Mexico and had been at Madrid's Atocha Station for several hours waiting for the train in Seville.

"We are here with tourists from all over the world; France, Portugal," Valero told the Associated Press. "Everyone is overwhelmed by the total chaos."

The serious delay comes a week after Spain and neighboring Portugal suffered an unprecedented and unexplained power outage, prompting the opposition conservative BJP (PP) to accuse the socialist-led government of incompetence.

"In the past week, we have had more common events in countries where we don't want to be similar; the government has forgotten the country where its citizens are."

PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo said thousands of people were trapped in trains without water.

"This is the second Monday and our scenario is not suitable for the fourth largest euro zone economy," he said. "People should not pay more taxes for worse services. Spain needs to operate again, and that's my goal."

Spanish Environment Minister Sara Aagesen warned in an interview with El País on Sunday that it may take several days to discover the cause of the power outage last week. She also responded to her own view that it was too early for the opposition and others to point their fingers at the country’s renewable energy.

“Blaming renewables (the reason for the blackout) seems irresponsible and simple to me,” Egerson said. “Irresponsible because we are talking about a resource that has been a vibrant combination for a long time. And, in addition, over many days we have generated very similar power, with a lot of renewable energy, even low demand, and the system works well.”