Friday, October 09, 2009 PARIS: French agents have arrested an engineer working at the CERN nuclear research lab on suspicion of being in contact with the Al-Qaeda militant network and planning attacks, officials said Friday. "Perhaps we have avoided the worst," Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told journalists, adding that investigators were trying to establish which targets in "France or elsewhere" the suspect was hoping to strike. Security sources in Paris said the suspected Islamist, one of a pair of brothers detained on Thursday, worked at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva. The pair were arrested in Vienne, a town on the Rhone river some 100 kilometres (65 miles) southwest of the Alpine lab, by officers from France's security service acting on a warrant from an anti-terrorist magistrate. According to officials, the engineer had made contact over the Internet with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a North African offshoot of Osama bin Laden's loosely organised global Islamist militant movement. He had expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had "not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation", one said.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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