James Gillies, a CERN spokesman, said the physicist was still registered as a member of the research team but had not been seen for some time. In a statement, the center said that he had worked as an analyst on projects involving its Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, since 2003, but that he was not an employee and his project would not have been of any use to terrorists.
“His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism,” said the center’s statement, whose formal name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. “None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain.”
It seems that Al Qaeda ties are taken seriously in France.
Huzzah for France!
