The United Kingdom has expelled three Chinese spies operating in the country, who posed as journalists over the past year, AFP reported quoting a report in the Daily Mail.

The three spies were understood to be Beijing’s Ministry of State Security’s intelligence officers, the paper said on Thursday, citing an unknown senior government source.

“Their true identities were uncovered by MI5 and they have since been forced to return to China,” it said, referring to the UK’s domestic intelligence agency.

All of them claimed “to work for three different Chinese media agencies,” the source claimed, adding they had all arrived in the country over the past year. However, it did not name the Chinese media agencies.

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Ties between the UK and China have increasingly strained as the former criticised Beijing for its repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and banned Huawei from its local 5G networks for security reasons. 

British authorities revoked the licence of the Chinese news outlet CGTN, on Thursday, after discovering that its state-sponsored ownership structure had violated UK law.

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Ofcom, British regulator said that Chinese media outlet CGTN’s Star China Media had failed to show that it had editorial control over the network and that the proposed transition to another media company would still be connected to the Chinese Communist Party.

The English-language satellite broadcaster has long been criticised for echoing the Communist Party line in its global broadcasts.

In the United States, it is one of seven Chinese media outlets that have been designated as state-sponsored actors rather than as independent media.