http://www.euronews.com/ French prosecutors want a Franco-Algerian nuclear scientist to spend six years behind bars.
Adlène
Hicheur, who worked at the CERN research centre in Geneva, Switzerland,
is on trial in Paris on charges of criminal association as part of a
terrorist entreprise.
Police arrested him after intercepting emails he wrote to an alleged al-Qaeda contact.
Hicheur has spent the past two years in custody awaiting trial.
His lawyer Patrick Baudouin said of the e-mail exchange:
"The
prosecutor tried to prove those words were actually showing an
intention to concretely act, helping to prepare or directly preparing a
terrorist action. This is exactly what I contested, because Adlène
Hicheur's words hadn't mentioned any precise planning of anything in
particular."
When asked by euronews if police had identified the alleged Al-Qaeda contact, he said:
"This
person has not been formally identified, but throughout the
investigation they said it appears to be Mustapha Debchi, who is
allegedly a senior member of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, based in
Algeria. "But if you are sure about his identity, you don't say 'it
appears to be' -- you say it is that person in question."
Hicheur's
trial comes more than one week after French president Nicolas Sarkozy
proposed to make repeated surfing of extremist websites a criminal
offence following the Toulouse shootings.
