Thu Mar 4, 3:24 AM ET
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei - Oil-rich Brunei has jailed without trial two retired senior army and police intelligence officers and a businessman for leaking government secrets, some of them posted on the Internet.
The retired policeman, Nordin bin Haji Mohamad Noor, was also accused of treason for spying after allegedly transferring classified documents to an unidentified foreign country, the government said in a statement.
Noordin, retired army Maj. Muslim bin Awang Tengah, and businessman Awang Abdul Razak bin Awang Damit, were stripped of their military and civilian titles and were being held under internal security laws that allow for detention without trial under terms renewable every two years.
The scandal was the biggest since Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah's younger brother, Prince Jefri, nearly bankrupted this tiny country in the late 1990s through failed investments and lavish infrastructure projects that lost some $7 billion.
Muslim allegedly leaked government documents and secrets, which Awang Abdul Razak, son of a local bus company owner, posted on a Hong Kong-based Web site, www.bruclass.com.
"Their actions, which were of subversive nature, are detrimental to the country's stability and security," said the statement, released late Wednesday by the Internal Security Department.
Government officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that the men were believed to have been detained sometime in January.
They were accused of inciting hatred against the government of the Sultan, absolute monarch of this remote enclave of 350,000 people on the island of Borneo and one of the richest men in the world.
The security and financial activities of the Bruneian government are closely held in the Sultan's hands and few details reach the public. The statement announcing the arrests was carried in local media without elaboration.
The country has an unofficial policy that criticizing the monarchy, Islam and the ethnic Malay origins of the majority are off-limits.
The offending Web site postings were signed with the pseudonym Maja Pahit — a former empire centered on what is now Indonesia — and appeared to have been based on tightly held information on Brunei's administration and military.
On Thursday, the postings were still up, but some had been edited or completely eliminated. What remained was a collection of detailed complaints, mostly about incompetent bureaucracy and economic mismanagement.
Brunei has been spared the Islamic extremism and terror activities that have troubled neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia.