A NUCLEAR scientist arrested for alleged links to terror group Al Qaeda may have once worked at the Rutherford Appleton Research Centre in Harwell, near Didcot, it was claimed last night.
Anti-terrorism officers working for the French government arrested a 32-year-old and his 25-year-old brother in Vienne, South-East France, last week.
It is understood the arrests were made by the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence – the French equivalent of MI5 – in a bid to pre-empt a potential terrorism atrocity.
Yesterday news agencies reported the 32-year-old had worked as a researcher at the Oxfordshire nuclear research centre.
The Home Office and the Metropolitan Police refused to comment on the arrests, but MI5 is understood to be examining the two men’s British links amid fears they were plotting a terrorist attack in the UK.
Lucy Stone, a spokesman for the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which owns Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, said: “STFC has not been informed that any of our employees have been arrested.”
The lab is one of the Government’s biggest centres for physics.
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