London, October 14 (ANI): The brother of the Large Hadron Collider physicist under investigation for having possible links to terrorism has said that the charges are “completely false” and his brother is innocent.

On October 13, French authorities placed Adlene Hicheur, a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), under formal investigation for possible ‘criminal association in relation to a terrorist undertaking’.

He has been held by police since October 8, after a raid at his family’s home in the town of Vienne, southeastern France.

Press reports cite that anti-terrorism police apparently have evidence that the 32-year-old may have had e-mail correspondence with “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” - the North African branch of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda - about potential targets for terrorist attacks within France.

But, according to a report in Nature News, Halim Hicheur, Adlene Hicheur’s brother, claims that the charges are unjustified.

He does not deny that family members frequently trade e-mails with people in Algeria. But he categorically denies there was any email correspondence with al-Qaeda.

“Most of my family is from Algeria,” he said.

But he maintains that there is nothing in his family’s background “that would have made us think about violence”.

Contrary to several press reports, Halim is a 30-year-old postdoc in biomechanics working in Germany and says that he was not arrested with Adlene on October 8.

“I have never been contacted by the police,” he said, explaining that it was their 25-year-old youngest brother who was picked up by police and released without charge on 10 October.

Based on conversations with other family members, Halim believes that Adlene’s arrest is probably connected to a land purchase in Algeria.

Halim told Nature that just before the police raid, Adlene withdrew 13,000 Euros in cash with which to purchase land near the family’s ancestral home of Setif in northeastern Algeria.

He said that the police were initially asking questions about the money.

Adlene’s colleagues at CERN consider him to be a shy but brilliant young physicist who specializes in esoteric data analysis and the alignment of massive particle detectors.

The physicist who worked with Adlene added that there is nothing from Adlene’s high-energy physics training that could have been used in a terrorist attack.

“We don’t have any material or anything you could use for bad things, except maybe a hammer,” he said. (ANI)