Cern Project Update:
October 10,2009
Al Qaeda suspect worked at Swiss nuclear lab
French authorities have arrested an engineer working at an international nuclear research laboratory on suspicion of having links with the
Al Qaeda militant network.
Officials connected with the case say the Algerian man worked at the
CERN nuclear laboratory on the border with Switzerland.
Police arrested the man and his brother after following internet exchanges between the two and other people believed to have links to extremist groups.
Computers, USB drives and hard drives were removed from the brothers' home.
It is believed the older man was planning attacks in France.
According to the Figaro newspaper, the arrests could represent an important step in the hunt for Al Qaeda networks.
- BBC
October 10,2009
Al Qaeda suspect worked at Swiss nuclear lab
French authorities have arrested an engineer working at an international nuclear research laboratory on suspicion of having links with the
Al Qaeda militant network.
Officials connected with the case say the Algerian man worked at the
CERN nuclear laboratory on the border with Switzerland.
Police arrested the man and his brother after following internet exchanges between the two and other people believed to have links to extremist groups.
Computers, USB drives and hard drives were removed from the brothers' home.
It is believed the older man was planning attacks in France.
According to the Figaro newspaper, the arrests could represent an important step in the hunt for Al Qaeda networks.
- BBC
(03-29) 03:52 PDT PARIS, France (AP) --By JAMEY KEATEN and INGRID ROUSSEAU, Associated Press
Thursday, March 29, 2012
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/03/29/international/i021525D28.DTL#ixzz1qoBjxioI
For Adlene Hicheur, France's biggest terror attacks in years could not have come at a worse time.
For 2-1/2 years, the former nuclear physicist at Europe's most prestigious particle accelerator has been in prison awaiting trial on charges of plotting terrorism with Al-Qaida's north African wing — claims his lawyers and allies deny vigorously.
Just a few weeks before the Thursday start of the trial, in an apparently unrelated case in southern France, another young man of Algerian descent, Mohamed Merah, was carrying out a spate of shooting attacks.
Merah told police he filmed himself killing three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers — and claimed affiliation with al-Qaida. He was killed in a shootout with police, but his rampage has shaken the French national psyche.
It is in this national context, with the Merah case eclipsing even France's presidential election race, that Hicheur finally goes on trial in a Paris court.
The cases of Hicheur, 35, and Merah, 23, are not the same. Hicheur never took a single step toward carrying out a terrorist act, he just spouted off online, his lawyers insist.
But any French person — including the judges who will be ruling on the Hicheur case — would need to have been living under a rock over the last week to miss out on new concerns about the threat of terrorism in France today.
"Clearly, the events of Toulouse and Montauban don't appear to create the most favorable conditions for the trial of Adlene Hicheur," said Hicheur lawyer Patrick Baudouin, referring to the two southern municipalities in which Merah carried out his slayings.
"We're really going to have to insist that there's no conflation," he told The Associated Press this week.
The Merah case has stirred up such a national fervor that re-election-minded President Nicolas Sarkozy has floated a proposal to make it a crime to repeatedly visit jihadist Web sites — in part because French counterrorism officials fear such "lone wolf" attacks by militants who self-radicalize online.
And Hicheur's case is all about the Internet.
A nuclear physicist at Switzerland's celebrated CERN laboratory, while laid up with a herniated disk in 2009, Hicheur railed in various e-mails about the need to punish Western governments for the allegedly anti-Muslim wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an order sending the case to trial.
He is accused of conferring with an alleged al-Qaida contact about possible assassination or bombing plots, but his defenders say it was all talk, no action. Hicheur faces charges of "criminal association with a view to plotting terrorist attacks."
His advocates allege the Algerian-born scientist fits French authorities'"profile" for the homegrown terrorist they most worry about: Muslim, young, angry at the West; well-educated, Internet-savvy, and self-radicalized.
Hicheur is very well-educated, integrated into French society and never took any steps to gather weapons, his supporters say. But the threat that he posed seemed even more potent because of his access to a potential security hazard — the CERN lab. He had no police record.
Merah, by contrast, struggled in school, ran with a ultraconservative Muslim crowd, and amassed a small arsenal. He claimed he stole to drum up money to buy weapons.
Hicheur was arrested in a pre-dawn raid on Oct. 8, 2009, at his parents' home in southeastern France, hours before he was to take a flight to Algeria to work on a real estate purchase, Baudouin said.
Baudouin said French investigators pored over about 35 emails between Hicheur and an alleged Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb contact. Some cited possible targets, including a French military barracks in the Alps.
Investigators say Hicheur, under police questioning, admitted that he believed a contact he had in the email correspondence — a man in Algeria named Mustapha Debchi — was part of AQIM. A police search of Hicheur's computer also turned up a file folder titled "tempo AQMI" — for the group's French language acronym.
Debchi allegedly sought to persuade Hicheur to carry out a suicide bombing — which he refused, responding that it was against Islam, and that he had no intention of dying prematurely, the court documents showed.
CERN says it adheres to the principle of innocence until guilt is proven and looks forward to Hicheur receiving a fair trail, CERN spokesman James Gillies said Wednesday.
Hicheur was on contract with CERN from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. A postdoctoral researcher, his contract with CERN expired at the end of March 2010, a few months after his arrest, according to institute spokesman Michael David Mitchell.
Hicheur is the only person to face trial in the case.
"I hope today that we'll have a trial that separates the context of the killings in Toulouse and Montauban, (and) that the case of Adlene Hicheur is judged individually," the lawyer said.
"Hicheur mustn't be a scapegoat for a case he has nothing to do with."
___
John Heilprin in Geneva contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/03/29/international/i021525D28.DTL#ixzz1qoAkOCMs
Update March 29th 2012
By Associated Press, Published: March 30PARIS — A French state prosecutor on Friday asked a Paris court to sentence an Algerian-born nuclear physicist to six years in prison for his suspected role in plotting terrorism with al-Qaida’s north African wing.
The request came at the end of the two-day trial of Adlene Hicheur, a former researcher at Switzerland’s CERN laboratory for alleged “criminal association with a view to plotting terrorist attacks.”
The three-judge panel has recessed for deliberations before handing down its verdict on May 4. Hicheur, who has been behind bars since he was arrested in October 2009, risks a maximum 10 years in prison.
The 35-year-old scientist and his defenders say he was a victim of allegedly overzealous French anti-terrorism laws and that he explored ideas on jihadist websites — but never took any concrete step toward terrorism.
The case centers on about 35 emails between Hicheur and an alleged contact with Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb named Mustapha Debchi, who tried to convince him to carry out a suicide bombing. Hicheur declined, but in one response suggested striking at the barracks of a battalion of elite Alpine troops in the eastern town Cran-Gevrier.
Hicheur claimed he was on morphine for a herniated disk and going through a personal “zone of turbulence” when he wrote an 2009 email that advocated an attack on the barracks.
Prosecutor Guillaume Portenseigne rejected Hicheur’s claims of a lack of lucidity and characterized the defendant as “a man who had everything going for him ... but just got led astray in a radical jihadist Islam.”
“Adlene Hicheur was a budding terrorist: He only needed that determining meeting to slip” into concrete action, the prosecutor told the court.
Defense lawyer Patrick Baudouin said a conviction would be “an error” and that “From the beginning, everything has been done to demonize him, to make him into ... France’s most dangerous terrorist, potentially susceptible to participate in a bombing.”
That, he argued, “would place on his shoulders something that he is incapable of doing — fortunately.”
Hicheur’s defenders say the context of the trial makes their case difficult because of recent terror attacks in France. Earlier this month, in an apparently unrelated case, police say another young man of Algerian descent killed three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers in the cities of Toulouse and Montauban and claimed ties to al-Qaida. Mohamed Merah, 23, died later in a shootout with police.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/6-year-prison-term-sought-in-french-
trial-of-ex-cern-physicist-accused-of-terror-plot/2012/03/30/gIQAPMerlS_story.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17554653
French Cern scientist goes on trial for 'al-Qaeda plot'
Emails sent by Adlene Hicheur apparently discussed targets
A nuclear scientist at the Cern laboratory has gone on trial in France accused of plotting terrorist attacks.
Adlene Hicheur has been in custody since his arrest two-and-a-half years ago, after police intercepted his emails to an alleged contact in Al-Qaeda.
Court documents say the emails proposed targets and suggested Mr Hicheur was willing to be part of an active unit.
His lawyers say he only expressed views online and he was never part of a plot.
The French domestic intelligence service, DCRI, looked at 35 emails sent between Hicheur and an alleged contact in al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
He had been under surveillance for 18 months as investigators monitored the account of Algerian Mustapha Debchi, alleged to be a member of AQIM.
Investigators say the emails, in which the men use pseudonyms, discuss possible "military and political targets to punish governments" in Europe and in particular France.
But Mr Hicheur, who was born in Algeria, never said he would actually carry out an attack.
Shadow of Merah shootings
Adlene Hicheur's family have complained his emails were "misinterpreted"
They were sent while Mr Hicheur was at home from his work at the Cern particle accelerator, suffering from a herniated disc. During this illness he is said to have consulted numerous Islamist websites.
His supporters say he was only expressing strong views and was not planning attacks.
At the start of the trial Mr Hicheur criticised the case against him. "I see a lot of confusion and inaccuracies," Agence France-Presse reported.
"It would be too tedious to revisit each of them (but) the assertions about me... are inaccurate, are subject to debate."
His brother, Halim, complained that the emails had been interpreted in a "biased way".
"This dossier was tampered with from the beginning by the DCRI. Some people wanted to raise the spectre of the terrorism threat by the Algerian, Muslim nuclear physicist, etc."
The trial comes a week after French special forces shot dead Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people in Toulouse and Montauban.
Security issues have since dominated the French presidential election campaign, with President Nicolas Sarkozy proposing that anyone regularly visiting extremist websites should be prosecuted. The first round of voting takes place next month.
"The events of Toulouse and Montauban don't appear to create the most favourable conditions for the trial of Adlene Hicheur," said his lawyer Patrick Baudouin.
"We're really going to have to insist that there's no conflation."
Mr Baudouin told journalists that unlike Merah his client had no weapons in his possession, and no history of violence.
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