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
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