UK immigration officer among two men guilty of working for Chinese intelligence

A UK immigration officer has been found guilty of working for Chinese intelligence as part of a “shadow policing operation”.

Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 38, used his access to the main immigration database to track Hong Kong dissidents based in the UK.

He was found guilty under the National Security Act of assisting a foreign intelligence service alongside Chung Biu “Bill” Yuen, 65, who was initially his contact with the Hong Kong authorities.

Wai was also found guilty of misconduct in public office.

The jury could not agree on a charge against both men of foreign interference by forcing entry into the home of an alleged fraud suspect originally from Hong Kong in West Yorkshire.

The prosecution said it would not be seeking a retrial.

Wai started working as a Border Force officer at Heathrow Airport in December 2020, which gave him access to a vast database of information about foreign nationals in the UK.

He searched it on his days off and sick days, earning money on the side by tracking Hong Kongers who had fled pro-democracy crackdowns for his Chinese contacts. There seems to have been no checks on his access to the database to prevent him doing this.

But he had been providing information on dissidents before then, referring to them in messages as “cockroaches”.

Yuen became his contact with Chinese authorities. A former Hong Kong police officer, he worked as the office manager of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO) in London.

The pair were introduced in 2017 and by the middle of 2021, Wai was reporting directly to Yuen about the activities of Hong Kong dissidents and pro-democracy protesters in the UK.

Wai also drew a fellow Border Force officer, an ex-Royal Marine called Matthew Trickett, into his surveillance of Hong Kong dissidents, the court heard.

Trickett was found dead in a suspected suicide soon after they were caught by counter-terrorism police.
Wai, who holds both British and Hong Kong passports, had many jobs – including as a Metropolitan Police officer from 2015 to 2019.

He was in the Royal Navy for eight years, and worked for a company providing security for events in Chinatown. Wai had also set up his own company, D5 Security.

After leaving the Met, he became a volunteer constable for City of London Police.

Yuen had moved to London within days of retiring from the Hong Kong Police Force in 2015 to join his wife and two children, taking advantage of his dual British-Hong Kong citizenship.

Soon afterwards, he started working at HKETO. The office was set up to promote trade between Hong Kong and the UK, but became increasingly politicised after the 2019 protests in Hong Kong.

He and Wai were introduced in 2017 at a restaurant in London’s Chinatown by Chu Ting Tang, a prominent figure in the area is known to be sympathetic to the Chinese government’s policies in Hong Kong.

When Wai started working at Heathrow, he sent a message to the former chief superintendent of Hong Kong Police’s Criminal Intelligence Bureau Eddie Ma, who still had links to the Chinese state.

“Will not let any cockroaches in,” Wai wrote.

When he later sent Ma some information about recently-arrived Hong Kong dissidents, Ma wrote back: “The head office seems to be interested at these informations.”

Wai later began working with his fellow Border Force officer Trickett – who was also doing private security work to supplement his Home Office income – to gather information on Hong Kong dissidents.

By BBC News