The office manager of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London and another man are to go on trial in February for allegedly helping Hong Kong authorities gather intelligence in the UK, a judge said on Friday.
Yuen Chung Biu, 63, and Wai Chi Leung (Peter), 38, appeared at London’s Central Criminal Court for a preliminary hearing, charged with agreeing to undertake information gathering, surveillance and acts of deception that were likely to materially assist a foreign intelligence service between December last year and May 2.
Hong Kong authorities have confirmed that Yuen was the office manager of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London.
Photo: AFP
A third suspect, 37-year-old Briton Matthew Trickett, was also charged in the case, but he was found dead on Sunday last week in a park under what police said were unexplained circumstances.
Prosecutor Kashif Malik said during an earlier hearing that Trickett, reportedly a British immigration enforcement officer and a former Royal Marine, had attempted suicide after being charged.
He was also the director of a security company.
Photo: AFP
Police said in an updated statement on Friday that a coroner had completed a post-mortem and his death was not being treated as suspicious.
Justice Jeremy Baker set a trial date for Feb. 10 next year, set to last for about five weeks.
The judge said the men were granted bail on condition that they observe a set curfew and other restrictions.
The three men were charged under Britain’s National Security Act after an investigation by the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command. Prosecutors allege that the suspects also forced entry into a UK residential address.
They were arrested earlier this month in London and Yorkshire in northern England by counterterrorism police, using provisions of a new law that allows suspects in national security and espionage cases to be detained without warrant.
The case drew strong criticism from officials in Beijing and Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese control in 1997.
China yesterday accused Britain of “wanton stigmatization” and arbitrary arrests.
The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region said in a statement on its Web site that it strongly condemned the UK for what it said were false accusations against Chinese citizens, infringing on their lawful rights.
Britain’s acts were “a wanton stigmatization of China and arbitrary arrests and prosecutions of Chinese citizens in the United Kingdom,” it said.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) on Friday said that the charges were “an act of political manipulation in the name of national security.”
“It seriously infringed on the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese nationals in the UK, gravely undermined China-UK relations, seriously violated the principles of international law and the basic norms of international relations and badly harmed the image of the UK,” he told reporters.
Additional reporting by Reuters
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Three sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value, but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than US$500,000, said Ian Russell, president of GreatCollections, which specializes in currency and is handling an online auction that ends next month. What makes the dime depicting former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing “S” mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two
RSS