Brussels, Apr 29 (EFE).- Five Belgian elected officials, including former Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, called Monday for a response against China for allegedly engaging in computer espionage against them.
In a joint statement published Monday in the newspapers Le Soir et De Standaard, the five politicians from different parties spoke of the alleged attacks by hackers associated with Chinese intelligence directed at “any elected official who dares to challenge the Beijing regime.”
In addition to European lawmakers Verhofstadt and Hilde Vautmans, other politicians allegedly targeted by hackers of the APT 31 group are federal parliamentarians Samuel Cogolati, Els Van Hoof and Georges Dallemagne.
The five are members of the international association dedicated to human rights in China called the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.
“This was not an attack on any political party or country in particular. It was an attack on any elected official who dares to challenge the regime in Beijing,” the five said in their joint statement.
And they added: “We cannot allow this campaign of cyber attacks against elected representatives of the Belgian people to remain without a robust and proportionate response.”
Specifically, they asked the Belgian coalition government to impose sanctions against the hackers of the APT31 group or to open a judicial investigation for foreign interference, as well as a greater right to information for parliamentarians who are victims of attacks perpetrated by foreign states.
The five would have opened emails that served as a gateway for spies, according to Belgian media, which show that the impact of the espionage is still unknown but it is suspected that they were able to modify the IP addresses of their computers to be able to geolocate the devices.
The names of Van Hoof, president of the Belgian parliamentary committee on Foreign Affairs, and environmentalist Cogolati, vice-president of the same committee, already appeared last week in newspaper reports as victims of the attacks.
Then-Belgian Foreign Minister the liberal Hadja Lahbib, announced that she was going to summon the charge d’affaires of the Chinese Embassy in Belgium.
“Members of Parliament must be able to work freely. It is the basis of our democracy. Following recent reports of intimidation and hacking against members of the Belgian Parliament, the Chinese charge d’affaires will be summoned,” the minister said on social media platform X.
Belgium is also investigating whether China captured and used former Belgian senator and politician Frank Creyelman as an intelligence asset for more than three years. Creyelman is connected to the far-right Flemish nationalist movement Vlaams Belang and his brother Steven chaired the party’s parliamentary committee on Military Procurement.
Belgium is also investigating whether the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba carried out espionage through confidential data held by the company’s logistics division in Liege, in eastern Belgium, where the company has its main European headquarters. EFE
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