LONDON: Britain is running a secret Internet surveillance station in the Middle East, a report said Thursday citing the latest leaked documents obtained by fugitive US security contractor Edward Snowden.
The Independent newspaper said it was not disclosing the country where the base is located, but said the facility can intercept emails, telephone calls and web traffic for the United States and other intelligence agencies.
The British base taps into underwater fibre-optic cables in the region, the newspaper said.
It passes the information back to the British electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), in Cheltenham, southwest England, which then shares it with the US National Security Agency.
Britain's Foreign Office said when contacted by AFP about the report that "we do not comment on intelligence matters".
The Independent did not say how it obtained the details from the Snowden files.
Snowden, a former NSA contractor, first released details of US and British surveillance activities through the Guardian newspaper earlier this year. Russia has granted him temporary asylum as he bids to avoid prosecution in the United States.
British counter-terror police on Thursday launched a criminal investigation into documents seized from the boyfriend of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke the Snowden story.
The Guardian said this week that GCHQ experts had on July 20 supervised the destruction of the hard drives and memory chips on which its Snowden material had been saved.
The government has confirmed that Prime Minister David Cameron's most senior policy advisor, Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, was sent to tell the Guardian they had to either destroy or return the material, or face legal action.
Britain has secret Middle East web surveillance base: report
Britain has secret Middle East web surveillance base: report
Israel agrees to ‘limited reopening’ of Rafah crossing: PM’s office
- The announcement came after visiting US envoys reportedly pressed Israeli officials to reopen the crossing, a vital entry point for aid into Gaza
JERUSALEM: Israel said Monday it would allow a “limited reopening” of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt once it had recovered the remains of the last hostage in the Palestinian territory.
The announcement came after visiting US envoys reportedly pressed Israeli officials to reopen the crossing, a vital entry point for aid into Gaza.
Reopening Rafah forms part of a Gaza truce framework announced by US President Donald Trump in October, but the crossing has remained closed after Israeli forces took control of it during the war.
The Israeli military also said it was searching a cemetery in the Gaza Strip on Sunday for the remains of the last hostage, Ran Gvili, a non-commissioned officer in the police’s elite Yassam unit.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the reopening would depend on “the return of all living hostages and a 100 percent effort by Hamas to locate and return all deceased hostages,” Netanyahu’s office said on X.
It said Israel’s military was “currently conducting a focused operation to exhaust all of the intelligence that has been gathered in the effort to locate and return” Gvili’s body.
“Upon completion of this operation, and in accordance with what has been agreed upon with the US, Israel will open the Rafah Crossing,” it said.
