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Two men have been jailed for spying for China, in what’s thought to be a UK first.
Getting into it: Peter Wai, a UK Border Force officer at Heathrow, and his handler Bill Yuen, an office manager at Hong Kong’s London trade office and a former Hong Kong police officer, were convicted of assisting a foreign intelligence service under the National Security Act 2023. Wai was sentenced to 10 years, partly for misusing his job to search immigration databases, and Yuen to eight, with both men denying the accusations.
Prosecutors described a “shadow policing operation” run for Hong Kong and ultimately the Chinese state, with Yuen tasking Wai to surveil UK-based pro-democracy campaigners and Wai abusing his Border Force access to track Hong Kong nationals. Wai’s own security firm was paid around £95,500 out of a trade-office account.
The targets included prominent activists who had fled to Britain, among them Nathan Law, who has a roughly £100,000 bounty on his head and was photographed being followed at an Oxford Union event. Soon after Wai took the Heathrow job, he messaged a Hong Kong police contact that he would not let any “cockroaches” in, the slur used for dissidents.
The pair were caught after a failed attempt to force entry into a Hong Kong woman’s flat in Pontefract in May 2024, when they posed as maintenance workers and trickled water under the door to sell a fake leak. A third man charged alongside them, ex-Marine Matthew Trickett, was found dead days later in an apparent suicide.
China’s embassy has dismissed the case as “a political move of abusing the law.”
This all comes as China has been accused of similar moves on US soil, running undeclared “overseas police stations” that the US says exist to monitor and intimidate critics of the Chinese government. The biggest US case centered on a station tied to the Fuzhou branch of China’s Ministry of Public Security, run out of an office building at 107 East Broadway in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The FBI searched it in October 2022 and recovered a blue banner reading “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York, USA,” then arrested two men, Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, in April 2023.
The Spain-based advocacy group Safeguard Defenders first flagged the network in 2022, and watchdogs have counted roughly 100 of these outposts in more than 50 countries, including at least seven in the US. Beijing says they’re not police stations at all but volunteer-run centers that help Chinese nationals with things like renewing driver’s licenses.
