Two former AIVD security service officials have been found guilty of leaking state secrets to a Telegraaf newspaper journalist by the appeal court in The Hague.

Heleen S and her partner Hans H were sentenced to 16 and eight months in jail respectively for passing the newspaper confidential information about the Dutch position on Iraq and security during a visit by the Dalai Lama.

The information led to two Telegraaf exclusives.

In their efforts to trace the leaks, the security service tapped the phones of several Telegraaf journalists, which was later ruled illegal in court.

The two former AIVD workers were earlier found not guilty when judges ruled the evidence against the two had been obtained as a result of the illegal taps, and was therefore inadmissible in court.

Exclusives

In one exclusive, the paper accused AIVD staff of simply copying reports about Iran’s alleged weapons of mass destruction from Britain’s M16 and other foreign security services, without any independent verification of the facts. The Netherlands supported the invasion of Iraq partly on the basis of AIVD reports.

The second focused on claims that threats had been made against the Dalai Lama during his visit to the Netherlands in June 2009.