By Emily Andrews, Peter Allen and Nick Mcdermott
Daily Mail
A nuclear scientist arrested by armed police is said to have admitted plotting an al-Qaeda terrorist atrocity, possibly in Britain.
Dr Adlene Hicheur, 32, has confessed to talking over the Internet with the North African branch of the terror organisation about attacks on "Western targets", according to officials in France where he was held last week.
Hicheur, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, worked for the CERN nuclear research laboratory near Geneva and had also worked at the top secret Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England.
French authorities have been working with MI5 to track his movements in the UK amid growing fears he could have been planning a nuclear attack in Britain.
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Agents from both countries fear he had been 'pinpointing nuclear targets' before passing them on to terrorists in Algeria.
Hicheur's apparent confession in a high-security Paris jail came as his brother Dr Halim Hicheur, 25, was released without charge after three days of questioning.
"Following questioning, and the accumulation of evidence, it is believed that the older brother had been planning to commit at least one terrorist attack," said a senior intelligence source working on the case.
He added that US monitors had picked up the Internet exchange between the scientist and his North African contact.
A British security source said: "It appears that al-Qaeda are now deliberately recruiting extremely intelligent people who have both the knowledge and the resources to potentially create a nuclear bomb or identify nuclear targets.
"This man is an eminent nuclear physicist who has worked at universities across the world, so it is a worrying development."
At CERN - the European Organisation for Nuclear Research - Hicheur worked on the Large Hadron Collider, which aims to recreate conditions after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe.
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