**French magistrates have filed preliminary charges against a nuclear scientist accused of links to al-Qaeda.**The 32-year-old man of Algerian descent was one of two brothers detained in the south-east town of Vienne on Thursday.
He works at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), Europe’s main centre for the study of atoms, on the Swiss-French border.
He appeared in court on Monday to face charges of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise”.
Preliminary charges allow a judge to investigate before deciding whether to proceed with a trial.
Judicial sources told the AFP news agency on Friday that agents had come across the men during a separate inquiry into the recruitment of would-be Islamist militants who wanted to fight in Afghanistan.
The physicist had exchanged messages over the internet with people known to be close to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had “not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation”, one said.