Parliamentary worker is also president of the Franco-Korean friendship association

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Intelligence agencies have arrested a senior French civil servant on suspicion of passing confidential information to North Korea, a judicial source has said.

Benoit Quennedey – who worked at the senate, the upper house of the French parliament – was taken into custody late on Monday, the source in Paris said. He is also the president of the Franco-Korean friendship association and has written books on the isolated nation.

After an inquiry which began in March, prosecutors suspect him of the “collection and delivery of information to a foreign power likely to undermine the fundamental interests of the nation”.

Quennedey is being held at the headquarters of France’s DGSI domestic intelligence agency outside Paris.

The French news and talkshow Le Quotidien, which first reported the story, said he was arrested at his home and his senate office had been searched.

According to the senate website, Quennedey is a senior administrator in the department of architecture, heritage and gardens, in charge of administration and finances.

The office of the senate president, Gerard Larcher, declined to comment.

Quennedey has written frequent articles on North Korea and travelled extensively throughout the peninsula since 2005, according to the website of his publisher, Delga. Last year it published his latest work North Korea, The Unknown.

The Franco-Korean friendship association, formed in the late 1960s by journalists sympathetic to socialist and communist causes, pushes for closer ties with Pyongyang and supports the reunification of North and South Korea.

Quennedey attended France’s elite Sciences Po university as well as the ENA school which produces its top civil servants and political leaders.

In 2013 he wrote North Korea’s Economy: Birth of a New Asian Dragon?, despite years of strict international sanctions aimed at forcing the country to abandon its nuclear missile programme.

In regular interviews with RT France, part of Moscow’s Russia Today network, Quennedey is presented as an “expert in international relations” and comments on Korea and other subjects.

North Korea has been an international pariah for decades over its refusal to give up its nuclear weapons programme.

Sanctions have crippled its economy, and the UN estimates that some 10.3 million people, or 41% of its population, are undernourished.

But hopes of a breakthrough were sparked last June when Donald Trump met Kim Jong-un for a historic summit meeting in Singapore. The US president and the Korean leader vowed to improve relations and Kim indicated he would abandon the nuclear work.

But progress since then has been patchy, and Washington is still pushing to maintain sanctions until Pyongyang’s “final, fully verified denuclearisation”.