TAIPEI: A Taiwanese court yesterday sentenced a former intelligence officer to 18 years in prison for spying for China, the latest in a series of espionage scandals in recent years.
Lo Chi-cheng, formally a colonel in the military intelligence bureau, was convicted of selling classified information to China multiple times between 2007 and 2010 in return for about $250,000, the high court said.
A military tribunal in 2011 had sentenced Lo to life in prison, which he appealed. The high court reduced his sentence on the grounds that he had confessed and shown remorse.
Defence authorities have said “damage control” measures began after Lo was arrested in late 2010 but have not elaborated.
Media reports say Lo sold lists of spies stationed on the mainland and other secret information to China, which compromised crucial Taiwanese intelligence networks and endangered the lives of agents.
Lo was recruited by a Taiwanese businessman, who was sentenced to three years and six months in jail for his role in the case in a separate ruling.
Manila plans to expel Canadian
MANILA: The Philippines plans to deport a Canadian national this week after he was reported to be “inciting and recruiting locals to conduct terrorist activities.”
The Philippines has been checking raw intelligence reports that about 100 Muslims in the predominantly Muslim south had left the country in response to the global calls of Islamist militants to fight for Iraq and Syria.
Siegfred Mison, head of the immigration bureau, said the Canadian, Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, would be deported within the week after the bureau filed a complaint that he was an undesirable individual.
He said Philips was the second foreign national to be deported over alleged links with Islamist militants, after an Australian Islamic preacher caught last July in Cebu in the central Philippines.
“Based on various sources of information, he was supposed to be inciting and recruiting people to conduct terrorist activities,” Mison told reporters, but gave no details of the sources.
Agencies
