Eight computers stolen from the Home Affairs Ministry
Authorities guarantee that no classified information was compromised.
Police have arrested a suspect in connection with a break-in at the General-Secretariat of the Ministry of Internal Administration, on Rua de São Mamede in downtown Lisbon, in which eight computers were stolen.
The suspect is a 39-year-old Portuguese man, known as a drug addict, with a history of petty crime in France.
Investigators believe that the man acted alone.
According to reports, the burglary took place at 5am on Wednesday, August 28, but the officer on duty at the premises wasn’t alerted until 9.52am, when staff began to arrive and saw offices in disarray “with signs of having been rummaged through”.
During the break-in, eight computers were stolen. One of the computers belonged to Teresa Costa, the Deputy Secretary-General of the Home Ministry, and the other computer belonger to the head of the IT department.
The equipment has not yet been recovered and the suspect said that he sold the computers (worth 600 euros each) on the same night.
The PSP is said to be on the trail of a Senegalese national, who belongs to an organised group with no fixed address and that usually operates in downtown Lisbon.
The Ministry of Internal Administration has since issued a statement saying that there is no (nor has there ever been) risk of undue access to confidential information.
Instead, the Ministry claimed that of the eight computers stolen, only two were used regularly and the rest were spare or replacement computers.
“Furthermore, these computers were not, nor have they ever been, connected to, nor do they have access to, classified or relevant information,” the text continues.
The Ministry also denied that the building’s video surveillance cameras were “faulty or switched off”: “They were working normally and the images were visible at the respective checkpoint”.
However, it did admit that there had been a “failure to record the images”, but that this “did not prevent the identification of the suspect and his arrest”.
The suspect will now be brought before a judge in an enquiry being carried out by the Lisbon Department of Investigation and Penal Action. Between the incident and Monday, the PSP deployed several teams on the ground and arrived at the suspect by gathering information and analysing evidence, according to CNN.
Margarida Blasco, the Minister of Internal Affairs, said in a statement sent to the press that “the intrusion was only possible by climbing into an adjacent building, which is undergoing intervention”.
Parties request a Parliament hearing
Following the break-in, both the Liberal Initiative (IL) and the Socialist Party (PS) have called for the Minister of Internal Affairs to be heard in Parliament “as a matter of urgency”.
The Socialists said that the incident represents a “serious security breach, which raises serious questions about the protection of the sensitive information contained in the stolen computers and the possible violation of citizens’ personal data”.
IL, meanwhile, blamed “an apparent lack of security culture in state institutions”, demonstrated by this case and other episodes in the past.
This “jeopardises not only the security of the country and its citizens, but also its credibility with international partners, especially in an increasingly hostile international context,” the party said.
Chega considered that the assault on the building of the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Home Affairs to be “a rather caricatured and ridiculous situation” that shows “the lack of security that exists in Portugal”.