Leaked documents showed that US diplomats suspected high-ranking Chinese government involvement in hacking attacks on the US-based internet giant Google Inc, according to a report Sunday in the British newspaper The Guardian.
The revelation was from US diplomatic cables obtained and released by the website WikiLeaks. The allegations were contained in correspondence from the US embassy in Beijing to the State Department in Washington, dpa reported.
US diplomats expressed the belief that the cyberattacks a year ago on Google were being directed by a high-ranking member of China's Politburo who supposedly was angered upon googling his own name and finding critical comments, according to well-placed US diplomatic sources.
The incident led to the attacks in December 2009 on Google, which were first reported in January.
The hacking attacks, along with pressure from Chinese officials for censorship of search results, were followed by Google's decision to pull its Chinese-language search engine out of China's potential market of 400 million internet users.
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