Nuclear engineer from Cern lab arrested for al-Qaeda links
French authorities have arrested an engineer working at the Cern nuclear research lab on suspicion of links with al-Qaeda.
The suspected Islamist, one of a pair of Algerian brothers detained today, worked at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) on the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva.
The brothers were arrested in the town of Vienne in southeastern France and are suspected of being close to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), also known as al-Qaeda’s north African wing.
Le Figaro newspaper reported that the older brother, who worked at Cern, had been in contact with AQIM and had suggested several French targets for militant attacks.
While the authorities say there was no evidence of “a clearly established plot at this stage”, I would like to know how much access these two subjects had to nuclear materials that could be used in a dirty bomb, and how far along they were.
I suspect that the nuclear materials at CERN pose less of a problem than the information they could obtain. A stint at CERN might also give the impression that these guys had been carefully vetted, causing other scientists to be less careful with info.
I doubt that whatever nuclear material that exists at CERN would be of any use to terrorists. CERN’s an accelerator and lab, not a fission or fusion plant; they’re welcome to all the hadrons they can capture, but they’re not going to find fissionable uranium or plutonium there, at least not in any significant amounts. So this case is probably one of two things:
1. This was a person learning nuclear physics, possibly to hire out later.
2. They were casing CERN for a terrorist attack.
Neither are fun scenarios to ponder, but on the other hand, they seem farfetched. If we presume their goal is the former, then sending someone to CERN is sort of a misfire: CERN is not really the right place for what they want. It would be fundamental particle physics they’re learning about there, not the practical, hands-on knowledge behind actually creating fission or fusion reactions, like at Oak Ridge (Link http://www.phy.ornl.gov/). A physicist coming out of CERN will know a boatload about quarks, bosuns, singularities, their interactions, and the “Standard Model”, but his fission/fusion knowledge will be the generic kind any particle physicist will know. At that point, they might as well get the Pakistani developers who’ve already demonstrated practical knowledge applicable to nuclear weaponry. Sending a guy to CERN is a waste of time in this regard.
And regarding possible casing of the facility for a terrorist hit: I’m sort of at a loss to imagine why they’d choose CERN – remember, al Qaeda hit economic and military targets in 9/11 – but even I admit that it’s a high profile, high prestige facility for the Swiss government, and Europe in general. It’s farfetched, but worryingly possible. I tend to discount it because al-Qaeda has shown a propensity to go after other things – embassies mostly – but I worry because I can’t eliminate CERN being a target of theirs. I just think it’s a low probability one.
I guess there’s a third possibility: The guy’s trying to leave his past behind and become respectable. And if that’s the case, more power to him. I actually hope that’s what’s happening here. But I’d want to see proof of this before converting “hope” into belief. Right now, there’s no evidence saying that, so there’s no reason to presume it.
Meh… here’s to hoping this turns out to be little to nothing. But I’m a bit too cynical to bet on that happening.