GENEVA — A nuclear physicist working at the world’s largest atom smasher has been arrested on suspicion of links to the Algerian branch of al-Qaeda, another blow to a project that has been plagued by glitches and was shut down after an electrical failure a year ago.
The scientist, arrested in France, is suspected of having links to al-Qaeda’s North African offshoot, which has carried out a deadly campaign against security forces in recent months, a French official said Friday.
The judicial official said the suspect, whom he did not identify, was one of two brothers arrested Thursday in the southeastern French city of Vienne, 20 miles south of Lyon. The official spoke anonymously because the case is ongoing.
The scientist has been assigned to analysis projects at the laboratory since 2003 and was one of more than 7,000 scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest atom smasher, said the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN.
The physicist had no contact with anything that could be used for terrorism, it said.
“None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain,” CERN said.
The collider experiment where he worked is the smallest of a series of installations along the 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.
The arrested brothers were French and ages 25 and 32, police said. The arrest was part of a French judge’s probe into suspected terrorist links. Police searched the suspects’ apartments and seized their computers.
Many of the scientists at the laboratory live in France, and about half the operation is on French territory.
