Terrorist suspect linked to ‘big bang’ facility

One of two men arrested in France on Thursday on suspicion of having links with an Islamist terrorist group was working as a researcher at the Cern “big bang” laboratory on the French-Swiss border, the nuclear research body said on Friday.

The man, believed to be a French national of Algerian descent, was detained by police near Poitiers with his brother, after allegedly being in contact with people close to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a branch of the terrorist network.

Cern said the man arrested was a physicist working with the Large Hadron Collider experiment intended to re-create conditions immediately after the “big bang” that created the universe.

The suspect’s role at Cern will raise concerns that suspected Islamist militants are seeking to acquire advanced technological expertise, or that the laboratory at Cern, which stands for European Organisation for Nuclear Research, could have been targeted for a potential attack.

Source/Full Story: FT.com
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