A physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider was yesterday arrested in Vienne, France on suspicion of terrorist links.

Europe’s premier high energy physics lab CERN issued a statement today saying the researcher was not a CERN employee but was working on analysis projects associated with the LHCb experiment, and had been doing so since 2003.

“His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism: CERN is a particle physics research laboratory whose research addresses fundamental questions about the universe,” says CERN. “None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain.”