Fears Al Qaeda-linked scientist was planning nuclear attack on UK after MI5 learn he worked at top-secret British lab

From the Vlad Tepes Blog, via the Daily Mail London:

October 11, 2009

• MI5 investigate brilliant scientist’s links to world-famous Rutherford Appleton nuclear research centre
• French Interior Minister claims ‘worst may have been avoided’ after brothers’ arrest
• Uncanny parallel to Dan Brown novel as scientist hunting for ‘God particle’ is held over fears he planned to attack Britain
  

Raid scene: French police at the modest flat in Vienne where Adlene and Halim Hicheur were arrested on Thursday

A brilliant young nuclear scientist who was arrested in France last week over alleged links to Al Qaeda had worked for a top-secret British nuclear research centre.
Last night fears were growing that Dr Adlene Hicheur – who was a researcher for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire for a year – could have been planning a nuclear attack in the UK.
The French government said yesterday that the arrest of Hicheur, 32, and his brother Dr Halim Hicheur, 25, could have averted a terrorist atrocity.
They were seized after an 18-month investigation by French anti-terrorist police hours before Adlene Hicheur was due to travel to the laboratory where he now works at, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research near Geneva.
Halim Hicheur carries out research at similar high-security scientific institutions around Europe.
The brothers’ council flat was stormed at 6am last Thursday by eight masked officers from the elite Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (CDII), the French equivalent of MI5, and 20 armed riot officers.
With almost no noise, a spearhead unit rushed up the concrete steps leading to the cramped flat in Vienne, South-East France. A battering ram was used to break the lock and the warning ‘Armed police!’ shouted.
Large-calibre machine pistols and other weapons were aimed at those inside the flat, including the brothers’ parents and siblings.
Secret agents had been monitoring the brothers’ movements, and all their phone calls, text messages and emails were being bugged ‘in real time and minute by minute’, according to a security source.
‘It was like we were sitting on their shoulders. We knew exactly what they were saying.’

Mysteries of the universe: An aerial view of the Rutherford Appleton lab where Dr Hicheur worked The source said that Adlene Hicheur had been ‘pinpointing nuclear targets’ but would not be more specific.
The scientists were being questioned last night at the maximum-security headquarters of the CDII on the outskirts of Paris while MI5 began trying to piece together their movements and contacts in Britain. Read More »