UK Border Force officer convicted of spying for China

A UK Border Force officer with access to the Home Office’s main immigration database has been convicted of working for Chinese intelligence, according to the BBC. Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 38, was found guilty of assisting a foreign intelligence service and of misconduct in public office after prosecutors said he used the system to track Hong Kong dissidents living in Britain. Another man, Chung Biu “Bill” Yuen, 65, was convicted alongside him.

The case sits uncomfortably inside a system that markets itself as a gatekeeper. Wai joined Border Force at Heathrow in December 2020, a role that granted him broad access to sensitive personal data on foreign nationals. The jury heard he searched the database on days off and even on sick days, and that he had been providing information to Chinese contacts before taking the job. The BBC reports he referred to Hong Kong dissidents as “cockroaches” in messages, and that he involved another officer, ex-Royal Marine Matthew Trickett, in surveillance before Trickett was later found dead in an apparent suicide after counter-terrorism police intervened.

The prosecution dropped a retrial on a separate foreign-interference charge after the jury failed to agree, leaving a narrower conviction that still captures the core vulnerability: once an employee is inside a high-trust institution, oversight tends to be retrospective. Border systems are designed for throughput—queues moving, passports scanned, decisions logged—while internal auditing is slower, often triggered by suspicion rather than routine. A database query looks identical whether it is a legitimate check or a paid-for search for a hostile service, and the incentives for colleagues to raise alarms are weak when the cost is workplace conflict and the benefit is abstract national security.

The episode also underlines how political asylum and migration policy create a second layer of security obligations. Britain offered refuge to people fleeing Hong Kong’s crackdown, but the state then became responsible for shielding them—sometimes from the very institutions meant to control borders. That requires not only intelligence work but also mundane controls: strict access logs, anomaly detection on searches, and a willingness to narrow permissions even if it slows operations at a busy airport.

Wai’s convictions were delivered after he used the Home Office system repeatedly without an obvious operational reason. The database did not stop him; it recorded him.