Info on the nuclear physicist arrested for al-Qaeda ties

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So, a nuclear physicist working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was arrested last week for links to al-Qaeda. The story made the news, but details were not available. Now we have them.

The 32-year-old physicist is of Algerian origin; he was working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. Authorities refuse to release his name.

However, he was arrested alongside his 25-year-old brother on Thursday in the French provincial city of Vienne. His brother was released Saturday; the physicist had his custody extended and formal charges are expected to be named shortly.

I will not state the name of the physicist, who was working on an engineering-related assignment, for legal reasons. But names of CERN employees are easy to find on the internet and there are a limited number of North African last names; these can be cross-referenced by French speakers with last names found in Vienne.

French authorities report that the engineer had ongoing email contacts with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and had “vaguely discussed plans for terror attacks.” Before the emails were sent, the physicist was already allegedly under American surveillance because emails from him appeared on bulletin board threads related to “the recruitment of would-be jihadists to send to Afghanistan as guerillas.” When the emails discussing terrorist attacks in Europe were intercepted, they were forwarded to French authorities. According to AFP sources, the physicist had expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but “had not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation.”

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is closely aligned with their better known Bin Ladenite compatriots. Their activities are primarily focused on secular Muslim and Western targets in North Africa and francophone Europe. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, they “claim to be the local franchise operation for al-Qaeda, a worrying development for a region that has been relatively peaceful since the bloody Algerian civil war of the 1990s drew to a close. European officials are taking AQIM’s international threats seriously and are worried about the growing number of Europe-based cells.”

The physicist currently in custody was working on unnamed experiments in the Large Hadron Collider tunnels that were allegedly unrelated to nuclear weapons.