Aug. 11 () –
The head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the Australian secret service, Mike Burgess, warned on Sunday that they have detected attempts to actively influence foreign communities residing in Australia in which countries considered friends are believed to be involved.
“There are at least three or four (countries) that have been caught actively involved in interference in overseas communities in Australia,” Burgess said in statements to public broadcaster ABC.
“Some of them might surprise you. Some of them are our friends too,” said the head of the Australian secret services, who warned that he could make public which countries they are if their intervention poses a risk to Australian citizens.
Last month, Australia announced a plan to improve preparedness for possible foreign interventions, including by consolidating the Counter-Foreign Interference Task Force, which was provisionally established in 2020.
In recent months it has emerged that Australian secret services had discovered that a civil servant and a doctor had been recruited to spy on a dissident from a foreign regime living in Australia and that they had been offered thousands of dollars to do “whatever it took” to silence him.
A plan by a foreign secret service to lure a critic of a foreign regime living in Australia out of the country so that he could be “eliminated” has also been uncovered.
The Australian government has also raised the risk level of an attack from “possible” to “likely” due to tensions among minorities in the country as a result of the war in the Gaza Strip.
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