CERN physicist top suspect in nuclear terror plot

* Friends of Hicheur family claim French investigators have made a mistake
* Hicheur brothers not formally charged, held on suspicion

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: The scientist suspected of plotting terrorist attacks on nuclear sites in France is a brilliant, internationally known physicist who has worked on research projects in Britain and the US, the Independent has reported.

Adlène Hicheur, 32, who currently works on the "Big Bang" Large Hadron Collider experiment on the Swiss-French border, was once a research fellow at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, Oxfordshire. His name is attached to dozens of research papers presented at universities and nuclear research centres all over the world. Hicheur, and his brother, Zitouni, also a highly qualified scientist, were arrested at their parents' home on a suburban council estate at Vienne, south of Lyons, on Thursday. French investigators say that advanced, internet "bugging" equipment allowed them to read, in "real time", emails exchanged between the brothers and the North African branch of Al Qaeda. The messages are alleged to have contained, in recent days, suggested targets for attacks on nuclear sites in France and other countries "allied with the United States".

The brothers, French-born with devout Algerian parents, fit a worrying pattern seen before in the arrest of suspected extremists in France. Far from being frustrated or unemployed young men from the margins of society, both Adlène and Halim had succeeded brilliantly in the French education system and taken up senior academic or research posts. The younger brother, Halim, has a doctorate in physiology and the biomechanics of motion from the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris. He is now a research fellow at the Collège de France in Paris, France's most prestigious academic institution.

A mistake: According to the Independent, neighbours of the Hicheur family in Vienne said that they were devout and hard-working people who had lived there since the 1970s. The academic success of the sons has been the pride, not just of the family, but of the whole estate. "They were held out to young people here as an example of what you could achieve, whatever your background," said a local youth worker, requesting anonymity. "There is a state of shock at what has happened and some anger. People think that this must be a mistake," he added.

French counter-terrorism and intelligence agencies have been tracking Hicheur for 18 months, according to French judicial sources. His name came up during another investigation into the so-called "Afghan network" of French Islamist sympathisers, trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Using sophisticated monitoring equipment that allows them to read emails as they are transmitted, French intelligence concluded in recent days that Hicheur had reached the "intention or desire stage" of preparing to mount an attack on a nuclear site. A French intelligence source told the AFP news agency that he had not yet reached the "action stage" of gathering materials and detailed information. He had, however, put forward a list of several possible targets in emails sent to people in North Africa known to be linked to "Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" or AQIM.

The monitoring equipment used by the French intelligence services is so elaborate that it "is almost like reading over someone's shoulder", the then French interior minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, said earlier this year. Her successor, Brice Hortefeux, decided last week that it would be dangerous to extend the surveillance any longer.

Not formally charged: French police and agents from the internal security agency, the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI), raided the home of the brothers at Vienne on Thursday. Christophe Teissier, the magistrate who heads France's anti-terror judicial investigation unit, is currently questioning the two suspects. They have not yet been formally accused of anything but are being held on suspicion of "associating with wrong-doers linked to a terrorist organisation".

Hicheur is an internationally respected young nuclear physicist, whose name appears in research papers and seminars all over the world. He was educated at a school in Vienne and at the nearby Laboratory of Particle Physics in Annecy. He was a research fellow, studying for his PhD, at the Stanford University Linear Accelerator Centre in California in 1999 and 2002. He spent a year at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire in 2003, and taught and researched at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

For the past six years he has been working on a contract for the Atlas project, one of the programmes connected to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, on the Franco-Swiss border. After a series of delays and glitches, the collider is scheduled to operate fully for the first time next year. It will smash atoms against one another in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel in an attempt to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang. French judicial sources say that the brothers do not appear to have been planning to attack the Large Hadron Collider itself. Officials at CERN say that the scientist had no access to materials or sensitive information that could be used for terrorism. "None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain," CERN said.

Hicheur appears to have specialised in the measurement side of nuclear physics. His office at CERN was in the main complex, where the collider is located. His academic papers have included accounts of research on the "electronic width of the Upsilon particle" and "measurement of the branching ratios of colour suppressed decays". His recent work at CERN has included "studying, improving and designing new tracking tools" to measure the effects when the collider finally operates. Hicheur's research, meanwhile, concerns the movement of the human body.