Polish government re-arrests former Huawei official accused of spying for China

IntelNews.org (est. 1988) offers daily commentary on intelligence and espionage developments from around the world. It is edited by intelligence experts Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis and Ian Allen.

intelNews has previously reported, Wang Weijing was arrested in early 2019 in Poland, as part of an investigation of Huawei’s operations in the Polish capital Warsaw. The probe involved the seizure of electronic hardware and documents from Huawei’s offices, as well as the arrest of another man, identified as Piotr Durbajlo, who was allegedly being handled by Wang.

Durbajlo, a Polish national, is allegedly a mid-level executive of Orange, a French-headquartered telecommunications carrier that is Huawei’s main domestic partner in Poland. Polish media also reported at the time that, prior to joining Orange, Piotr D. served as deputy director of an unnamed Polish intelligence agency. That agency is now believed to be the country’s Internal Security Agency (ABW), which is Poland’s equivalent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Polish counterintelligence also searched Wang’s house, in which he reportedly lived for over a decade, after having learned Polish at the Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Interestingly, Huawei announced that it had decided to fire Wang soon after his arrest, saying that his actions had “no relation to the company”. In July of 2019, after six months of pre-trial detention, Durbajlo was released on a $31,500 bail, pending trial. Before the end of the year, Wang was also released on bail —allegedly in order to appease Chinese government officials, who were seeking at the time to deepen economic ties between Beijing and Warsaw.

Late last week, however, the ABW announced that Wang had been detained again, after a judge in the Polish capital reversed an earlier decision to release the suspect, in response to an appeal by the ABW. The former Huawei executive is now once again in pre-trial detention in Warsaw. He denies all charges against him and has pleaded not guilty to espionage. Meanwhile, hearings and depositions in the case of Wang and Durbajlo are continuing to take place behind closed doors. Each of the two suspects faces up to 15 years in prison, if found guilty.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 02 August 2021 | Permalink