CANBERRA, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Australia's domestic intelligence agency has seized confidential government documents that were obtained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Officers from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) entered ABC offices in Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane on Thursday night after the public broadcaster came to an agreement with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on their return.
The documents, which came from meetings of the inner-sanctum of government, were acquired by the ABC after they were found in a locked filing cabinet sold at an ex-government furniture auction in Canberra.
The ABC began publishing the Cabinet files, which contained classified information from several governments, on Wednesday afternoon.
Under Australian law, documents from Cabinet usually remain classified for 20 years.
Just hours after the first documents were released, ASIO officers entered ABC offices with safes to secure the documents while lawyers from the ABC and government negotiated.
"The ABC and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have agreed on the securing of and the return of the documents which were the subject of the ABC's Cabinet files reporting to the Commonwealth," the ABC said in a statement on Friday.
"This has been achieved without compromising the ABC's priority of protecting the integrity of its source and its reporting, while acknowledging the Commonwealth's national security interests."
The incident has been described as the biggest breach of government security in Australian history.
The ABC did not publish much of the information on national security grounds, but did reveal that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott's government considered cutting off welfare to anyone younger than 30 and that then-Immigration Minister Scott Morrison attempted to slow ASIO security checks for asylum seekers in 2013.
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Thursday announced that he will pursue legal action against the ABC after one of the documents claimed he was aware of the dangers of a government insulation scheme which was responsible for the deaths of four people.
