China Says It Detained a Foreign Consultant for Spying for Britain

China’s top intelligence agency said Monday that it had detained the head of an overseas consulting agency for working as a spy for the British government to collect Chinese state secrets.

The Chinese Ministry of State Security said it caught a consultant with the surname Huang, who collected China-related intelligence and found personnel on behalf of MI6. The British intelligence agency recruited and trained Huang — who is from an unspecified “third country” — in the United Kingdom and other places, the ministry said in a post on its official WeChat account. The British government equipped the individual with “special spy equipment,” the ministry wrote.

“After meticulous investigation, the national security agency promptly discovered criminal evidence that Huang was engaged in espionage activities, and took criminal coercive measures against Huang in accordance with the law,” the state security ministry wrote.

The post said that Huang provided the British government with 14 state secrets, and three pieces of intelligence. The statement did not specify the company that Huang worked for or the person’s nationality.

While the agency has made allegations of other individuals who had been caught spying for the U.S. government in previous WeChat posts, this is the first time that Beijing has accused the British of espionage in the public forum.

The British Embassy in Beijing did not respond to requests for comment.

The statement came four months after the revelation that a researcher who worked in Britain’s Parliament had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Beijing. The researcher, who has denied that he is a spy, worked with lawmakers on policy matters about China. China’s foreign ministry has repeatedly condemned the