French investigators have charged a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider with having links to terrorism following claims he was in contact with al-Qaida.
The investigating magistrate, Christophe Teissier filed the preliminary charges against the 32-year-old French national of Algerian origin, who has not been publicly named, for "criminal association with a terrorist enterprise", judicial officials said.
The suspect works at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or Cern, the research centre on the French-Swiss border near Geneva which operates the vast, underground particle collider, which aims to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.