Paris/Geneva  - One of two men arrested in France on suspicion of belonging to the terrorist network Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was working at the nuclear research center CERN, the institute said Friday.

The man, arrested on Thursday, "is a physicist who has been working on analysis projects with the LHCb experiment at CERN since 2003," said the research center.

The Large Hadron Collider project aims to discover what happened right after the Big Bang.

"His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism," CERN's statement read, adding that "none of our research has potential for military application."

According to figaro. fr, the 32-year-old suspect, who was arrested with his younger brother in the south-eastern city of Vienne, picked out potential targets for attacks within France for people associated with the North Africa-based group.

French police reportedly intercepted messages sent by the suspect over the Internet. The man, who is a French citizen of Algerian origin, was under surveillance for some
18 months before his arrest.

Reacting to the arrests, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said Thursday, "The investigation will no doubt reveal what the targets in France were and if were avoided a worst-case scenario."  dpa