A New York City police officer was arrested and charged with being a Chinese agent after being accused of relaying information about Tibetans in the New York area to the Chinese Consulate.
Baimadajie Angwang, a 33-year-old who was born in Tibet, was charged on Monday with acting as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the attorney general, wire fraud, making false statements, and obstruction of an official proceeding, according to CNBC.
The criminal complaint said that Angwang, who also served in the Army Reserve, has been “acting at the direction and control of PRC officials, has, among other things … reported on the activities of ethnic Tibetans, and others, in the New York metropolitan area to the Consulate” of China.
The officer, who worked in the community affairs unit in the 111th Precinct in Queens, initially came to the United States through a “cultural exchange visa,” but he stayed past his second visa while he “eventually sought asylum in the United States on the basis that he had allegedly been arrested and tortured in the [People’s Republic of China] due partly to this Tibetan ethnicity,” according to the complaint.
However, Angwang had traveled to China on “numerous occasion[s],” which “are not the actions of an individual who fears torture or persecution at the hands of the PRC, thus showing that his U.S. citizenship was secured through false pretenses.”
“State and local officials should be aware that they are not immune to the threat of Chinese espionage,” said John Demers, the U.S. assistant attorney general for national security, in a statement. “According to the allegations, the Chinese government recruited and directed a U.S. citizen and member of our nation’s largest law enforcement department to further its intelligence gathering and repression of Chinese abroad.”
New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea in a statement said, “As alleged in this federal complaint, Baimadajie Angwang violated every oath he took in this country.”
“One to the United States, another to the U.S. Army, and a third to this Police Department,” Shea continued. “From the earliest stages of this investigation, the NYPD’s Intelligence and Internal Affairs bureaus worked closely with the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division to make sure this individual would be brought to justice.”
