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British government laboratories had employed a physicist to work for Cern, Europe ’s world-renowned particle accelerator facility, who has now been arrested on charges of terrorism. Adlene Hicheur , 32, who is alleged to have links with Al-Qaeda, worked for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory ( RAL ) in Oxfordshire where he collaborated with some of its leading researchers. According to The Times, Hicheur was arrested last week and French police was interrogating him this weekend over allegations he had suggested targets for potential terrorist attacks. His brother, Halim, also a physicist, was arrested too. RAL , near Didcot, is one of the British government’s biggest centres for physics. Its research ranges from spacecraft design to particle accelerators and high-level computing. Hicheur is understood to have worked there for up to a year around 2005. During that time he had an RAL e-mail address and published scientific papers in collaboration with Stephen Haywood , a respected particle physicist who still works at the institution. Haywood was this weekend refusing to comment, as were senior RAL executives. Hicheur was arrested with his 25-year-old brother at their family home in Vienne, eastern France , as he was about to set off for work at the physics laboratory in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.