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Swedish soldier fed secrets to Serbian lover

Paul O'Mahony
Paul O'Mahony - [email protected]
Swedish soldier fed secrets to Serbian lover

A female officer serving in Sweden's Kosovo force is suspected of having leaked secret NATO and United Nations documents to a Serbian spy with whom she had a love affair.

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The woman was sent home to Sweden last year following preliminary investigations by the Military Intelligence and Security Service (Militära underrättelse- och säkerhetstjänsten - MUST). A disciplinary committee later decided that there were not sufficient grounds for removing her from the army.

Recently, however, new information has emerged surrounding the case and the officer has once again been reported to the disciplinary committee.

The Swedish woman is suspected of sending sensitive information to the Serbian spy via e-mail.

The man, referred to in the investigation as 'Z', was working as an interpreter for the UN in Kosovo at the time of the alleged espionage.

"The loss of information caused by Z's activities is one of the most substantial in KFOR's history. It is of course extremely serious that a Swedish officer is suspected of involvement," said MUST's Klas Eksell in a statement.

After they had been seeing each other for around a month, Z is reported to have begun asking the Swedish officer to retrieve information about the NATO-led KFOR operation.

According to MUST, Z passed any information he received on to his superiors. The investigation found that Z had worked as a spy for a number of years.

Once the illegal intelligence gathering operation was uncovered, Z was held for questioning. He then disappeared and has not been seen since.

Though the contents of Z's computer had been deleted, investigators were able to recover extensive e-mail traffic between him and the Swedish officer.

A joint KFOR, UN and MUST investigation found that the officer had thousands of secret NATO and UN documents stored on her computer.

MUST concluded in its report that the officer willingly answered Z's questions and must have known that he was a spy.

In the private correspondence between the pair, investigators found references to "spy business". Z however wrote to her to say: "I am not a spy. I am a doer of good."

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