U.S. prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Snowden on charges of espionage, theft and conversion of government property, the Washington Post cited U.S. officials as saying Saturday.

Edward Snowden [People.com.cn]

The charges were filed over the leaking of documents about top-secret U.S. spying programs by the the former National Security Agency contractor, the officials said on the condition of anonymity, adding that the U.S. has asked Hong Kong to detain Snowden on a provisional arrest warrant.

The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered and a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications, according to the officials.

Snowden flew to Hong Kong on May 20 after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, bringing with him a collection of highly classified documents that he acquired while working at the agency as a systems analyst, and he has been staying there until now.

In his first response to the case, Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen said Friday that any request to ask the Hong Kong government to turn over Snowden should be strictly in accordance with the law of Hong Kong.

In another development, an Icelandic businessman was reported as saying on Thursday that Wikileaks partner firm DataCell had prepared a private plane in China to fly Snowden to Iceland onced Iceland's government agreed to grant asylum.

However, DataCell CEO Andreas Fink expressed his astonishment at the news and denied his company's involvement in the case, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Saturday.

The Icelandic government confirmed earlier that it had received an informal approach from a middleman who alleged that whistleblower Edward Snowden wants to seek asylum in the country.

News about the U.S. spying operations broke out as the Guardian reported on June 5 that the NSA is collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon under top secret court orders and it named Edward Snowden as the source of the leaks on June 9.

A Washington Post report on June 6 also said that the NSA and the FBI have been secretly tapping directly into the central servers of nine U.S. internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before Snowden went public with it.

Snowden said that by leaking the information he hoped to inform citizens about how 2001's Patriot Act is used to gather private information. Though the Obama Administration insists PRISM is a necessary weapon in the fight against terrorism, the program has sparked international outrage and concern for privacy.

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