UK border official and former Hong Kong cop convicted of assisting Chinese spy agency in Britain

LONDON (AP) — A U.K. border official and former Hong Kong police officer were convicted Thursday of spying for China by carrying out what prosecutors called “shadow policing” operations in Britain.

Peter Wai and Bill Yuen, both dual Chinese and British nationals, posed as legitimate police or intelligence officers to conduct surveillance and gather information about Hong Kong dissidents and pro-democracy supporters, prosecutors said.

A jury in the Central Criminal Court in London found them guilty on charges they violated the National Security Act by assisting a foreign spy service. Wai was also convicted of misconduct in a public office.

“These convictions send a clear message that transnational repression, foreign interference, unauthorized surveillance, and attempts to operate outside the law will not be tolerated on British soil,” said Bethan David, head of counterterrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service. “This conduct was deliberate, coordinated and carried out with full knowledge of who it would benefit.”

Chinese Ambassador Zheng Zeguang was summoned to the British Foreign Office after the convictions.

“The activities carried out by these men, on behalf of China, are an infringement of our sovereignty and will never be tolerated,” Security Minister Dan Jarvis said in a statement. “We will continue to hold China to account and challenge them directly for actions which put the safety of people in our country at risk.”

Hong Kong’s government said it wasn’t a party to the case, but firmly opposed “unfounded allegations” against it or the London trade office.

Wai, 40, worked as a U.K. Border Force officer and was a special City of London constable and ran a private security company.

Yuen, 65, was formerly a superintendent in the Hong Kong Police employed in London by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, the official overseas representative of Hong Kong’s government.

Hong Kong authorities had offered up to nearly 100,000 pounds ($136,000) for the capture of, or information about, pro-democracy supporters

Yuen went beyond his job description as office manager and helped gather intelligence on the locations of and activities of Hong Kong activists and politicians who had moved to the U.K. in recent years after authorities introduced a wide-ranging national security law in the Asian financial hub, prosecutors said.

Wai, who was paid from a trade office account, was convicted of misconduct for misusing police computer systems while off duty to gather the information, prosecutors said.

Phone messages showed the two conducted surveillance of former Hong Kong lawmaker Nathan Law and activists they referred to as “cockroaches”

Yuen told Wai to pay special attention to members of Parliament or government employees and in 2023 provided the name of prominent politicians, including Conservative lawmaker Iain Duncan Smith, a co-chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

The plot was discovered after counterterror police, conducting their own surveillance, disrupted an operation involving nine people as they tried to break into the northern England home of a woman from Hong Kong in May 2024, police said.

The woman, Monica Kwong, had been accused by her former employer, Beijing-based Australian businesswoman Tina Zou, of committing a 16 million pound ($21.8 million) fraud. Kwong claimed it was a setup.

The group arrested at Kwong’s home in West Yorkshire included Zou, Wai, and two other retired Hong Kong police officers. Yuen, who was in contact with the group, was arrested in London.

Investigators then began piecing together communications evidence to show Wai was assigned by Yuen to spy for Hong Kong and China.

The two men were charged along with Matthew Trickett, a U.K. immigration enforcement officer, who had also been arrested at Kwong’s home. He was later found dead in a suspected suicide. Zou was never charged.

The panel could not reach verdicts on charges that the men committed foreign interference by breaking into Kwong’s home.

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Associated Press reporter Kanis Leung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

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The age of Peter Wai has been corrected. He is 40 not 38.

Brian Melley, The Associated Press