By Max Colchester

LONDON -- A U.K. immigration official and Hong Kong trade official have been found guilty of helping the Chinese state spy on dissidents in Britain, the first convictions related to Chinese espionage in British history.

A court found Chung Biu Yuen, a retired Hong Kong police officer who is listed as an office manager at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London, and Chi Leung Wai, a former U.K. Border Force official, who worked overseeing immigration and customs controls at Heathrow airport, guilty of assisting a foreign intelligence service.

The Chinese embassy has previously denounced their arrests as a "malicious fabrication."

The case shines a light on the lengths that the Chinese state goes to keep tabs on critics and dissidents abroad. U.K. prosecutors said in a statement Thursday that Yuen and Wai researched pro-democracy campaigners living in the U.K. Some of these individuals had bounties of GBP100,000 placed on their heads, prosecutors said. The British-based dissidents spied on included Nathan Law, a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist.

Wai, who, as well as being an immigration officer, ran his own private security firm, was also convicted of misconduct in public office after he used a Home Office computer database to search for personal data on Chinese dissidents. Prosecutors said the 40 -year-old did this while off duty and on sick days to earn cash on the side of his day job. "Will not let any cockroaches in," Wai wrote to one Chinese contact.

Police found evidence that requests from Hong Kong came into Yuen, who worked at a London-based Chinese government agency that promotes overseas investment in the former British colony, and were then forwarded to Wai to carry out. Wai also recruited a fellow Border Force officer, an ex-Royal Marine called Matthew Trickett, to help spy on foreign dissidents. Trickett was found dead by suspected suicide shortly after being arrested. Yuen and Wai had previously pleaded not guilty in the case. Trickett's death is still being investigated.

Yuen, Wai and Trickett were arrested after a botched attempt by several men to enter an apartment in Wales back in 2024, as part of an alleged attempt to intimidate a woman who had previously moved to the U.K. from Hong Kong and was accused by her former employer of fraud.

To get her to open the door, the group, which included Trickett, pretended to be maintenance workers, and even poured water under her door, saying she needed to let them in because of a water leak. After forcing their way into the apartment they were arrested by U.K. counterterror police who were tracking the group. British police searched their phones to build a case against the two men.

British officials have previously warned that the Chinese state was keeping tabs on the large number of Hong Kongers who had fled to the U.K. following the Chinese imposition of a draconian security law in 2020 aimed at stifling mass protests that had swept Hong Kong. The security law permitted China's state security apparatus to operate openly in the city after years of doing so covertly.

The British government said the security law violated Hong Kong's judicial independence from Beijing -- which was supposed to last until 2047 as part of the British handover of the region and withdrawal of the last British governor in 1997. In response the U.K. opened a special five-year visa route to allow up to four million Hong Kongers to leave the country.

After the security law was implemented, the Hong Kong police set up a national security department that former officials said would likely be similar to the so-called Special Branch, the unit of the police force during British rule tasked with collecting intelligence and monitoring perceived threats of subversion.

Western governments have become increasingly concerned about Beijing's sprawling attempts to gather intelligence, ranging from hacking to spying.

The U.K. parliament's intelligence committee has previously warned about "Operation Fox Hunt," in which the Chinese government forces the repatriation of opposition figures living abroad. According to a report by the U.K. Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, China is known to have "conducted coerced repatriations of economic fugitives from the U.K. and kidnapping of dual nationals overseas."

The men will be sentenced at a later date.

Write to Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 07, 2026 13:01 ET (17:01 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.