Can't Take a Joke?
Never heard of 'just kidding'? Can't a fellow just kind of fool around without the world coming crashing down on his head? That's the trouble with you Western societies, you take everything so bloody seriously. This was my downtime. I was flexing my curiosity muscles as it were, just kind of poking around in my head, on the Internet, and things happen. You find yourself in awkward situations, where you're challenged and you just kind of say things to satisfy someone's demands. Doesn't mean you're serious.
Ask my parents. They'll vouch for me.
Well, it's true isn't it, security personnel of countries who somehow feel they've been targeted by malevolent forces they cannot control, but still are compelled to make an effort to protect themselves, do take it seriously when they find in their midst someone who is trusted, and who should be above reproach suddenly betraying himself when wisps of conversations are picked up and closely examined.
That must surely have been what occurred with a Franco-Algerian nuclear physicist. Someone whose cerebral functionality is on the elite scale, working as a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where studies of the Big Bang hailing the birth of the universe is serious business. Imagine, casually dropping at a cocktail party that you're bushed, been viewing so many photos of outer space and crunching numbers to derive conclusions.
What do you do for a living? Why, I'm a nuclear physicist, employed at CERN. Sure to make an impression and inspire awe in most ordinary people. Now, if you really want to inspire something in people and truly surprise them and take them aback, watch them gasping for air, add that you're also part of a terrorist network, and in your spare time you've been busy plotting atrocities for al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. Certain to impress.
There's no word whether Adlene Hicheur, 35 years of age and feeling his oats, did confess to anyone his double life, in an attempt to gain prestige, but he did appear before a Paris court just recently where he was sentenced to four years' incarceration after being convicted of plotting with al-Qaeda's north African branch, in plans to launch some interesting attacks.
He was charged with "criminal association as part of a terrorist enterprise" after being arrested at his parents' home near CERN. And there, in his parents' home police found a treasury of al-Qaeda and terrorist Islamist literature. Suspicions had been raised by AQIM itself having forwarded a peculiar statement to President Sarkozy, and France's DCRI domestic intelligence agency decided to pursue the lead.
Carrying out surveillance on email accounts, including Mr. Hicheur's, they discovered his email exchanges with Mustapha Debchi living in Algeria, and a member of AQIM. Mr. Hicheur made some overtures about "possible objectives in Europe and particularly in France", which doubtless made French intelligence agents pick up their alert eyes and ears to continue watching this intriguing pair.
But Mr. Hicheur had what he obviously felt was a plausible explanation, particularly his response when he was asked if he would be "prepared to work in a unit becoming active in France", and his answer was: "The answer is of course yes." He was, he explained, in a "physical and psychological state" of impairment at the time, on medication, while on sick leave for a slipped disc.
"I understand that some of the passages may have been uncomfortable or worrying ... There was nothing behind it." Trust me, he appealed. And let's face it - life is just so unfair. The court ruled, despite Mr. Hicheur's heartfelt pleas, that he had provided support to "various terrorist structures of the radical Islamist undergound by participating in Internet discussions with an AQIM member."
He was given five years. But then, on second thought, the court relented and decided - in the goodness of its heart and its wish to be accommodating and understanding to the fact of the "humiliation" that no doubt assailed the physicist at the historical memory of the colonization of Algeria by France - to suspend one of those years in prison.
Next case!
Labels: France, Human Fallibility, Immigration, Islamism, Security, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 08, 2012
<< Home