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Arrested CERN Physicist Gets 5 Years For Terror Plot
An anonymous reader sends this followup to news we discussed in 2009 of a CERN physicist who was arrested for allegedly being in contact with al-Qaeda. The physicist, Adlene Hicheur, has now been sentenced to five years in prison.
"He came under suspicion when threatening messages were sent to President Sarkozy in early 2008. The security services uncovered a series of email exchanges between Hicheur and an alleged al-Qaeda member called Mustapha Debchi. After his arrest in 2009 police found a large quantity of Islamist literature at his parents' home. At the start of his trial the 35-year-old scientist admitted that he had been going through a psychologically 'turbulent' time in his life when he wrote the emails. He had suffered a serious back injury, for which he had been taking morphine. But he always denied he intended to carry out any attacks."
Nice guess: "General director of the National Police Frederic Pechenard stated in November 2009 that Hicheur planned to attack a base of the National Defence in Annecy, which harbours the 27eme bataillon de chasseurs alpins, involved in Afghanistan." (Wikipedia.)
In short, it looks like he was a scientist who hated the government, not someone bent on destroying the accomplishments of western civilization.
Interestingly, the BBC article calls CERN "Cern" as though it were a person. To whom do we address our complaints?
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He did confess to writing the threatening emails. that is considered a crime.
He sent threats to the president of France. That a crime most countries would take pretty seriously.
Hardly. Conspiracy and planning to commit a crime is a crime, for good reason. Do we wait for a murderer to shoot someone before we can arrest and charge him? No, and for good reason.
Thought-crime is quite different from actively communicating willingness to be part of an "active terror unit" (as TFA says).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I think I read before that BBC policy is to only capitalize the first letter of acronyms, as distinct in this context from initialisms, which are when you abbreviate something with the first letter of every word but don't pronounce the result as if a word e.g. Cern vs EPA.
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