Physicist Adlène Hicheur’s ejection from Brazil to France remains unexplained.

source: http://www.nature.com/news/mystery-deportation-of-particle-physicist-leads-to-swell-of-protest-1.20587

• At around lunchtime on 15 July, police removed particle physicist Adlène Hicheur from his home in Rio de Janeiro and escorted him to the airport. That evening, they commanded him to board a flight to Paris, accompanied by three Brazilian police officers. From there, he was transported to his parents’ home in the small southeastern town of Vienne and placed under house arrest. He must report to police three times a day and cannot leave home between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m..
• Two months later, the reasons for Hicheur’s sudden deportation remain a mystery. In 2012, a French court convicted him of plotting with al-Qaeda’s North African branch to carry out terror attacks on military and economic targets on French soil. Hicheur and his supporters, including scientific colleagues, maintain his innocence and say his trial was a miscarriage of justice. Brazilian authorities had discussed his past with scientists before allowing the physicist to come to work in Brazil in 2013.
• Once back in France, Hicheur was placed under house arrest using state-of-emergency powers introduced following a spate of terrorism attacks; officials there say that he still constitutes a security threat.
• His colleagues, with the backing of several institutions, are ramping up their pleas to Brazilian authorities to explain the reasons for the deportation. They are concerned that it violated Brazilian law and breached Hicheur’s human rights. Neither Hicheur nor his institution, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), has been given a justification for his deportation, UFRJ colleagues say, and Hicheur had no chance to contest its legality.
• After Hicheur’s deportation, the justice ministry issued a brief statement saying little more than that the decision was based on a recommendation by the federal police, and that Hicheur’s presence was an “inconvenience to the national interest”. In an interview with the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, justice minister Alexandre de Moraes said Hicheur had not communicated with terrorist groups, or committed any crime while in Brazil. But he said he felt it was “absurd” to allow someone who had been convicted of terrorism-related offences to live and work in the country. “Furthermore, he is a nuclear physicist, who, in a laboratory, has all the material at hand,” he added — apparently unaware that Hicheur studies the physics of fundamental particles.
• But Shellard says that he discussed Hicheur’s past with Brazil’s foreign office when he and others invited the physicist to Rio in 2013. Because Hicheur had served his prison term in France, and had recommendations from leading scientists, officials had no problem with his coming to Brazil.
• Nadine Borges, a lawyer and human-rights expert at the UFRJ, says that she is taking up Hicheur’s case in a personal capacity. In France, Hicheur’s lawyers filed in July to have his house arrest lifted, but the request was quickly rejected by a Grenoble tribunal. Hicheur says he now will appeal to a higher court.