A police officer who was a member of a special service in charge of presidential security has been suspended and detained on suspicion of “leaking secrets”, officials said Thursday.
The man, identified only by his family name of Tsao, was on secondment from the Special Police Sixth Headquarters since May 20, when President Lai Ching-te took office, said Lien Ching-tzong, an official at the unit.
He was detained on December 9 and suspended after “a court found that Tsao’s involvement in leaking secrets was serious and there was a risk of collusion”, Lien told reporters without providing details.
There has been a series of spying cases in Taiwan as China maintains military and political pressure on Taipei to accept its claims of sovereignty.
Taiwan’s Liberty Times newspaper reported that prosecutors in the southern city of Tainan suspected Tsao of “leaking President Lai’s private itinerary and security information to friends”.
Lai’s spokeswoman Karen Kuo said that relevant units would cooperate with judicial investigations.
“For individuals suspected of breaking the law, they not only harm the hard-working military and police teams, but also the people and the country,” she said in a statement.
News website SETN said prosecutors had found confidential information from secret service files, such as foreign guests Lai received, police deployment and movement routes, in the mobile phone of a suspect in another case.
That information was then traced to Tsao, it said.
Prosecutors suspected that he might have been recruited by China to leak the president’s confidential itinerary, the SETN report said.
Four Taiwanese soldiers, including three from a military police unit in charge of security for the president’s office, were charged this month for photographing and leaking confidential information to China.
China and Taiwan have been ruled separately since 1949 but Beijing insists the island is part of its territory and has vowed to seize it one day.
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