Europe atom lab: physicist arrested on terror link

GENEVA — French police have arrested a nuclear physicist on suspicion that he had links to terrorist organizations in Algeria, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said Friday.

The man was one of more than 7,000 scientists working at the organization and has been assigned to analysis projects under contract with an outside institute, said the organization, known as CERN.

The man had no contact with anything that could be used for terrorism, said the organization. The LHCb experiment where he worked is the smallest of a series of installations along the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

The nuclear research organization said the unidentified man was arrested Thursday in the eastern French city of Vienne, 23 kilometers (20 miles) south of Lyon.

That coincides with the arrest by French police in Vienne of two brothers suspected of being in contact with al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb, but the organization was unable to say if that was the same case.

A French police official said officers arrested two brothers suspected of being in contact with al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb. The men were French and aged 25 and 32. The arrest was part of a French judge’s probe into suspected terrorist links.

Police searched the suspects’ apartments and seized their computers.

Al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb regularly targets Algerian government forces and occasionally attacks foreigners.

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 almost ever since.

Spokeswoman Renilde van den Broek said there was no indication of sabotage in the shutdown and that the arrested man would have had access only to the small experiment he was working on, and not to the tunnel itself.

The projects are aimed at making discoveries about the makeup of matter when the Large Hadron Collider — the world largest atom smasher — starts collecting data later this year or early next year.

“LHCb is an experiment set up to explore what happened after the Big Bang that allowed matter to survive and build the universe we inhabit today,” said a description on the organization’s Web site.

The Big Bang was a vast explosion that scientists theorize was the beginning of the universe 14 billion years ago.

The European laboratory has been working for years to build the $10 billion collider.

Not all physicists working on the LHCb project were informed of the arrest.

“This is news to me,” said Ken Wyllie, one of dozens of scientists in the department.

The prosecutor’s office in the Isere region said the arrest of the physicist had been transferred to the anti-terrorist section of the Paris prosecutor’s office.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Paris prosecutor’s office or the French Interior Minister.

Many of the scientists at the laboratory, whether or not they are employees of the organization or of other institutes around the world, live in France, and about half the operation is on French territory.

The man has been working on analysis projects with the LHCb experiment at CERN since 2003.

“None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain,” the organization said in a statement.

The laboratory said it is providing the support requested by the French police in the inquiry.

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Associated Press writers Bradley S. Klapper and Frank Jordans in Geneva, and Deborah Seward in Paris contributed to this report.