A Dublin civil servant has been accused of leaking confidential government information to a foreign intelligence service.<\/p>\n
Yevgen McKeeffe, aged 45, originally from Ukraine but with Irish citizenship, appeared at Dublin District Court today and was refused bail by Judge M\u00e1ire Conneely.<\/p>\n
It follows an investigation by the Garda Special Detective Unit (SDU).<\/p>\n
Mr McKeeffe has not indicated a plea.<\/p>\n
Mr McKeeffe is an executive officer – a junior management grade in the civil service. He has worked in two Government departments. <\/p>\n
Judge Conneely heard he was arrested on Thursday afternoon at departures in Dublin Airport.<\/p>\n
He was charged under Section 9 of the Theft and Fraud Offences Act for the unlawful use of a computer in his employment, which, on conviction, is punishable by a maximum 10-year sentence.<\/p>\n
Reporting restrictions were imposed, preventing journalists from revealing his address in Dublin, the specific government department where he worked, or the overseas country implicated in the case.<\/p>\n
However, the judge denied a defence application to prevent the media from naming the accused.<\/p>\n
Detective Sergeant Shay Palmer, of the Special Detective Unit, said he arrested Mr McKeeffe at departures in Dublin Airport, and brought him to a garda station, where the accused “made no reply” to the charge at 11.46pm yesterday.<\/p>\n
Judge Conneely noted that the lines of inquiry were that the accused had allegedly obtained or transferred official department data, “and supplied them to a foreign intelligence service for personal gain”.<\/p>\n
The court heard garda\u00ed seized electronic devices and documents during a search of Mr McKeeffe’s home and that his workplace was also examined, and his desktop computer was seized.<\/p>\n
Judge Conneely refused an application for bail.<\/p>\n
Legal aid was granted.<\/p>\n
Mr McKeeffe is due before Cloverhill District Court via videolink on Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Dublin civil servant has been accused of leaking confidential government information to a foreign intelligence service. Yevgen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-474886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}