Daniel Nemukuyu
TWO Africom Holdings bosses and a Harare businessman yesterday appeared in court on espionage charges after they reportedly illegally set up satellite communication equipment and leaked official secrets to foreign countries.
Africom acting chief executive Simba Mangwende and non-executive director Farai Rwodzi, together with Oliver Chiku of Global Satellite Systems, are also being charged with contravening Section 33 (i) of the Postal and Telecommunications Act that makes it an offence for one to illegally possess, control or work for a radio station.
The trio allegedly connived to install communication equipment at a yet-to-be-disclosed location and connecting it to the Africom main network system without the authority or knowledge of Africom management and the Post and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe.
It is the State’s case that between July this year and Thursday this week, the three sent confidential security information to Canada, the United States and Afghanistan.
The communication system was linked into the Africom system without the knowledge and authority of the company management, the State alleges.
The three – who were represented by Artherstone and Cook, IEG Musimbe and Wintertons law firms – were provisionally remanded in custody to today for a hearing on preliminary arguments.
Harare area public prosecutor Mr Jonathan Murombedzi appeared for the State, while provincial magistrate Mr Munamato Mutevedzi presided over the matter.
Mr Mutevedzi said he will make an effort to seek authority for the court to sit today, but he did not make a promise.
If the matter is not heard today, it will continue on Monday.
Yesterday, the defence team challenged the authority to prosecute presented by Mr Murombedzi during the initial remand in respect of the espionage charge saying it was not signed by the Attorney-General Mr Johannes Tomana.
According to the Official Secrets Act, the AG should authorise the prosecution of such serious matters.
It was the defence’s argument that the law did not allow the AG to delegate his power of signing the document after it emerged that one of Mr Tomana’s deputies had signed on his behalf.
The defence team argues that the deputy AG, who is said to have signed, did not write his or her name on the document.
Mr Mutevedzi reserved ruling on the prosecuting authority challenge.
The lawyers are yet to make bail applications.
According to the State papers, between July and October 27 this year, the three hatched a plan to send messages to the US, Canada and Afghanistan about confidential data from Government ministries.
It is alleged Chiku, who is connected to a Canadian firm called Juch Tech, invited the company’s representatives to Zimbabwe.
Juch Tech is reportedly hostile to the Zimbabwean Government.
While in Zimbabwe, Chiku allegedly organised a meeting with Rwodzi and discussed the installation of satellite dishes and other equipment capable of transmitting Internet voice over the Internet protocol.
The two allegedly agreed and Rwodzi referred Chiku and Juch Tech representatives to Mangwende.
Mangwende, the State alleges, then instructed Africom engineers to install the equipment brought in by Chiku and the Canadians.
The equipment was tested and it was fully operational.
Thereafter, the Canadians left the country and police investigations established that the three had bought the equipment in their personal capacities.
They allegedly operated the system for three months before their arrest.
Espionage is a serious offence which falls under Section 3c (ii) of the Official Secrets Act.
If convicted, one faces a jail term of up to 25 years.
A soldier stationed in Alaska was arrested Friday on suspicion of espionage, according to an Army official.
Spc. William Colton Millay, a 22-year-old military policeman from Owensboro, Ky., was taken into custody at 6:30 a.m. Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson by special agents from Army Counterintelligence and Army Criminal Investigation Command.
The FBI and Army Counterintelligence are continuing to investigate Millay, assigned to the rear detachment of the 164th Military Police Company, 793rd Military Police Battalion, 2nd Engineer Brigade. The unit, known as the Arctic Enforcers, deployed to Afghanistan in the spring without Millay.
Millay is in the custody of the Alaska Department of Corrections, where he is listed as a federal inmate at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
A U.S. Army Alaska spokesman said he could not elaborate on whether Millay has been charged, what charges he would face or whether he faces charges outside of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
“Today’s arrest was the result of the close working relationship between the FBI and its military partners in Alaska,” Mary Frances Rook, special agent in charge of the FBI in Alaska, said Friday. “Through this ongoing partnership, we are better able to protect our nation.”
The arrest comes as the military continues to reap fallout from the WikiLeaks case, in which former intelligence analyst Pvt. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to the anti-secrecy website.
Those documents included Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, confidential State Department cables, and a classified military video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver.
Manning was transferred in April to a confinement facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., amid claims Manning was mistreated in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. — charges the government denies.
BERLIN (Reuters) – German authorities have arrested two Russians suspected of espionage since the closing days of the Cold War, according to a report to be published in Der Spiegel news magazine on Monday.
Germany‘s Federal Prosecutor confirmed that two people suspected of espionage activities for a foreign country had been arrested on Tuesday in the states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Hesse by Germany’s elite GSG-9 special operations commando.
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US government officials and America’s European allies need to put more pressure on their Chinese counterparts to stop a “pervasive” cyber-espionage campaign and cybercrime targeting American companies, US Republican Mike Rogers said yesterday.
And Rogers, chairman of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also inisted “our allies in Europe and Asia have an obligation to confront Beijing.”
Espionage sponsored by the Chinese government has resulted in “brazen and wide-scale theft of intellectual property of foreign commercial competitors,” continued the Michigan Republican.
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A Chinese national has pleaded guilty to economic espionage for providing trade secrets from agricultural firms Dow and Cargill to the Chinese government.
Kexue Huang, pleaded guilty to one charge of economic espionage before a federal judge in Indiana, admitting that while he worked at Dow AgroSciences LLC and Cargill he obtained and transferred to China trade secrets from the companies. Huang was arrested and charged in an indictment in July 2010.
Huang worked for Dow from January 2003 to February 2008 and conducted research on an organic insecticide that was being developed by the company. The plea agreement filed in federal court in Indiana today asserted that between 2007 and 2010, Huang provided the Dow trade secrets to two people working for the Chinese government.
The court papers note that one of the unindicted co-conspirators was a Chinese exchange student studying at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany, who later moved to the Hunan Normal University in China.
“In stealing, transferring and using the trade secrets, Kexue Huang, a/k/a ‘John,’ intended to benefit Hunan Normal University, the national Natural Science Foundation and the 863 Program. Each of these entities is a foreign instrumentality of the People’s Republic of China,” the plea agreement said.
Program 863 is known as the “National High Technology Research and Development Program of China,” according to the indictment.
After working for Dow, Huang worked for Cargill and stole information relating to genetic information for enzymes used by the agricultural company. Court papers unsealed today in Minnesota revealed the theft of trade secrets at Cargill. The plea agreement estimates that Huang cost the two companies $7 million to $20 million in damages.
“We cannot allow U.S. citizens or foreign nationals to hand sensitive business information over to competitors in other countries, and we will continue our vigorous criminal enforcement of economic espionage and trade secret laws,” Lanny Breuer head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement. ” These crimes present a danger to the U.S. economy and jeopardize our nation’s leadership in innovation.”
