FRENCH authorities have arrested a nuclear physicist working at Europe's "Big Bang" laboratory who is suspected of having links to al-Qaeda in Algeria.
The organisation, known as Cern, says the man was one of 7,000 scientists on the Swiss-French border and was assigned to analysis projects under contract with an outside institute.
A French official said that the physicist was one of two brothers
held on Thursday in the eastern French city of Vienne. Police said the men were French and aged 25 and 32. The arrest was part of a French judge's investigation into suspected terrorist links.
The man had no contact with anything that could be used for terrorism, and there is no suggestion of sabotage, said Cern. The LHCb experiment where he worked is the smallest of a series of installations along the 17-mile circular tunnel. The projects are aimed at making discoveries about the make-up of matter when the Large Hadron Collider – the world largest atom-smasher – soon starts collecting data.
The collider started spectacularly a year ago with beams of particles flying in both directions on the first day of trying. But later that month an electric failure because of a construction fault caused the entire machine to shut down. It has been undergoing repairs ever since.
