Adlène Hicheur

Who is Adlène Hicheur?

Adlène Hicheur is a particle physicist with dual Algerian and French citizenship. After his master of theoretical physics in Lyon, he joined LAPP to work on the BaBar experiment, located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. His thesis, defended in 2003, was about the production of high energy Eta prime mesons in the decays of B mesons. After that he was a Postdoctorate in England at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, where he worked on the ATLAS experiment at LHC. He then joined the high energy physics department of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and works currently on the LHCb experiment.

Adlène Hicheur was arrested in France on October 8, 2009, after police allegedly intercepted emails between himself and Al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb, an Algerian based terrorist organisation. Two weeks after his arrest, the Algerian media compared Hicheur to Lotfi Raissi, who was first suspected of terrorism before being released without charges. An International Support Committee was organized by Adlene's friends and colleagues to support Adlene and to request a fair investigation.