After four knife-wielding inmates claiming to be aligned with the Islamic State instigated a mutiny in a Russian prison last week, resulting in the deaths of 13 people, even the Kremlin’s most loyal lieutenants raised critical questions about how it could have happened.

“Where did the prisoners get knives, flags and mobile phones in a maximum-security colony?” Aleksander E. Khinshtein, an arch-conservative member of Parliament from the ruling United Russia party, asked on his Telegram channel.

Only two months earlier, he noted, a similar revolt had taken place in another penitentiary, in the city of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia.

“Why, given the relevance of the terrorist threat and the sad Rostov experience, has the work on preventing extremism and the spread of destructive ideas in the penal system not been brought to the proper level?” Mr. Khinshtein continued.

The uprising last week in the Volgograd region, in which all the instigators were killed, was the latest in a series of violent episodes in Russia in which Islamic extremists either claimed credit or were blamed by Russian authorities.

In the Rostov incident, in June, six detainees accused of terrorism violently took control of a detention center before all but one of them were killed. One week later, gunmen in the predominantly Muslim Russian region of Dagestan simultaneously attacked Christian and Jewish places of worship, killing 22.

And in March, a Moscow concert hall became the site of Russia’s deadliest terror attack in two decades when terrorists killed 145 people and injured 550 more. U.S. officials said a branch of the Islamic State was responsible for the attack.

The questions about why these attacks keep happening pose a challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin, given the size and power of the Russian security services he oversees.

Officials, human rights activists, scholars and former inmates say the reasons behind the prison uprisings are systemic.

From the Tsarist days to the Soviet Gulag system through to today, Russian prisons have been notorious for harsh conditions, poor treatment, brutality and corruption. Wretched conditions were among the factors that pushed tens of thousands of convicts to agree to fight for Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Experts say that the knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine have exacerbated existing problems in many Russian prisons: lack of personnel, deteriorating conditions that feed grievances, and anti-Muslim prejudices.

“The most banal reason is that there is a shortage of staff,” Anna Karetnikova, an exiled human rights defender and a former senior prison official in the Moscow region, said in an interview.

Almost one in five jobs in the federal penitentiary service, known as FSIN, are vacant. At a meeting of the service’s board in March, the director, Arkady Gostev, lamented the low salaries, which he said lagged behind other law enforcement agencies. He called for “urgent measures” at the central government level that would encourage more applicants, according to the Interfax news agency.

Job postings for the prison that was attacked last week in the Volgograd Region, known as IK-19, advertise monthly salaries of 35,000 rubles, about $380, for junior inspectors. Mark Galeotti, a scholar focused on Russia’s security sector, suggested after the IK-19 mutiny that the low salaries have prompted prison employees to sign up for jobs with the Russian military that pay much more.

Another factor in prison unrest, experts say: the miserable conditions, which make them incubators for unrest. One former IK-19 inmate named Dmitri said prison life was so unpleasant that he decided fighting in Ukraine would be better.

“The room is two steps to the side, two steps forward and back. And that’s for two people, said Dmitri, 28, in a phone interview. He spent half a year in prison under investigation for fraud. Like some others inside Russia who were interviewed, his last name is being withheld because he feared repercussions.

“The ventilation doesn’t work, so when it’s hot, you can barely breathe,” he said. “We complained several times, but nothing changed. The water is another story — it stinks terribly, it’s impossible to drink it.”

Addressing the very question raised by Mr. Khinshtein, the lawmaker, Dmitri said that if an inmate had money, he could smuggle anything into the colony, including phones and drugs.

“And many people have knives, they make them at the workshop inside the prison,” he said.

Dmitri said he did not sense any hostility or hierarchy among prisoners of different faiths. But he said that other inmates had told him that after the June mutiny in the Rostov prison, the IK-19 administration “became fixated on Islam,” confiscating prayer rugs and forcing prisoners to shave off their beards.

None of the hostage takers at IK-19 were in prison on terrorism charges. But during the uprising, they mentioned that they wanted “revenge for the fact that the beards of believers in the colony were shaved, and that holy books and prayer rugs were confiscated,” according to a Russian newspaper, Kommersant.

The poor conditions led many inmates, including non-Muslims, into prison groups known as “jamaats,” for protection, said Vera Mironova, a scholar at Harvard University and the author of a recent book on how power structures in prisons have evolved in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nominally Muslim, the groups have little real connection to the tenets of Islam, she said, but have evolved into bodies that challenge the prison authorities and invoke the name of the Islamic State to instill fear.

Igor Nagavkin, a human rights defender specializing in the rights of prisoners in the Volgograd region, said he began receiving complaints from the penal colony in the spring of this year.

“The head of prison security threatened some prisoners with sexualized and physical violence,” Mr. Nagavkin said in a phone interview from the Volgograd region. He provided a copy of an official complaint he filed to the head of the FSIN department in the Volgograd region.

Referring to a 1999 comment by Mr. Putin, Mr. Nagavkin noted that the Russian president had said that terrorists should be “rubbed out in the outhouse.”

So there were officers who took his words to heart, Mr. Nagavkin said, and used them as an excuse to mistreat inmates.

According to Mr. Nagavkin’s complaint, two prisoners cut their veins and four went on hunger strike because of the administration’s threats. The authorities at IK-19 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Signs of discrimination were also noticed by Russia’s best known political prisoner, Aleksei A. Navalny, “Our prison system, a large organization, has found a new enemy,” he said the month before his death in February. “This new enemy is called Muslims.” ​​

A 2023 report by the Civic Assistance Committee, a human rights watchdog, mentioned several instances in which Russian prison administrators destroyed prisoners’ Qurans, restricted access to prayer rooms and beat Muslim prisoners while voicing “statements of religious and national hatred.”

Both Ms. Mironova, the Harvard scholar, and Ms. Karetnikova, the former Moscow prison official, said conditions are ripe for more mutinies like the ones in Rostov and Volgograd.

“After the first seizure of the prison in Rostov, when I was asked about how this could happen, I concluded that it is actually strange that it has not yet been repeated throughout the country,” Ms. Karetnikova said, “because there are a lot of conditions and prerequisites for such attacks, and they are increasing.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

To many of the athletes arriving at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, the part of the city designed specifically for them amounted to something of a utopia.

The Paralympic Village had plenty of adaptive scooters that, when latched onto the front of a wheelchair, help it easily navigate the athletes’ mini-city, which is situated in the hilly exurbs of northern Paris. Tri-level water fountains had spouts at standing height, wheelchair level and ground level — for guide dogs. Every shower in the athlete housing complex could be rolled into. Even the T-shirt racks in the official merchandise store could be reached from a seated position.

“It’s the place in the world where I feel the least disabled,” Birgit Skarstein, a Norwegian para rower, said. She added: “I don’t have to go on Google Maps and zoom to see if there are stairs wherever I’m going, you know, to plan. I don’t need to figure out whether I can go to the toilet, because I know. And if the world could be like a Paralympic Village, it would be better for all of us.”

But never mind the world — even the rest of Paris is not like its Paralympic Village. Though the city made extensive improvements in the years leading up to the Games, it will be decades before its cobbled streets, narrow sidewalks and small parks achieve even a semblance of the Village’s accessibility.

Paris’s 124-year-old Metro system poses the largest challenge. Despite the considerable investment in infrastructure made since 2017, when the city won its Olympic bid, only 25 percent of the rail network that travels to central Paris — including the Metro, express rail and trams — is accessible to people with disabilities. And only one Metro line, its newest, is fully accessible to those who use wheelchairs.

“Just to make sure we become full-rights citizens — that’s the whole challenge and the whole idea of the Games,” said Michaël Jérémiasz, a former wheelchair tennis player and member of the Athletes Council who advised the Games’ organizers. “So we’ll measure all this in probably five, six, seven years. That’s where we can really measure the impact of the Games. Before that, that’s not something we’ll feel probably in real life.”

‘The Metro Is a Disgrace’

Before the Paralympic opening ceremony Wednesday, some of Paris’s efforts to improve accessibility were evident. Tactile strips, which aid visually impaired people, blended into the surroundings at some crosswalks near the Arc de Triomphe. Beige boxes attached to sturdy lampposts each housed a button that, when pressed, sounded a series of bells to let visually impaired pedestrians know it was safe to cross the street.

The improvements were made possible by an investment of nearly $140 million as part of an effort to make the Games accessible to everyone. Lamia El Aaraje, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of universal accessibility, said in an interview that 91 percent of municipal buildings would be fully accessible by 2025, up from 40 percent in 2022. She added that nearly $25 million had been spent to bring the city’s bus network to full accessibility by redesigning bus stops and training staff to accommodate disabled passengers.

Along with tactile strips and audible signals at 225 crosswalks, the city also added parking in 17 “accessibility enhanced” districts, with the goal of meeting its pledge to be “universally accessible” before the Olympics opening ceremony in July. The area also has 1,000 additional accessible taxis that Ms. El Aaraje said would remain after the Games.

While she acknowledged that having the Olympics as a deadline had been a useful cudgel to expedite development, Ms. El Aaraje said it went only so far in motivating the many stakeholders across a number of local and national entities.

“The Paris Metro within the city walls, the historic Metro, is not accessible,” she said. “And it’s true that it’s a pity we didn’t seize the opportunity of the Games to try and accelerate this issue.”

On Monday, Valérie Pécresse, the head of the public transport authority Île-de-France Mobilités and president of the Île-de-France regional council, proposed a plan for making all of the railway’s older lines fully accessible at a cost of 15 to 20 billion euros. Ms. Pécresse said the agency was ready to assume a third of the cost and called on the state and the city of Paris to cover the rest.

“We need to sit down and agree on the principle that the main transport issue for the next few years is not the creation of new lines, but the accessibility of the historic network. It’s a political decision that all three of us need to make,” Ms. Pécresse said.

But Ms. El Aaraje called financing a third of the proposal “far-fetched” and said the city had “done our part” in redesigning roads to allow for accessible transport.

“We have been pushing the argument in favor of making the Metro partially accessible,” she said via text.

France passed its first law requiring accessibility in public spaces in 1975, with no deadline for compliance. In 2005, the Law for Equal Rights and Opportunities for People With Disabilities set an initial target date of 2015, but provided no penalty to ensure enforcement. A 2014 act extended the deadline to Sept. 26.

“This deadline, in an extraordinary coincidence, coincides to within a fortnight of the end of the Paralympic Games date,” said Nicolas Mérille, accessibility adviser to APF France Handicap, an advocacy group. By that time, all establishments open to the public, from kindergartens to tobacco shops, should be accessible.

“And public transport must be accessible,” Mr. Mérille said. “And we can already see that there will be a huge backlog.”

Still, in 2021 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities criticized France for “systemic discrimination against persons with disabilities.” The European Council for Human Rights condemned the country in 2023 for failing to increase access to education, health care, buildings and transportation. (Days later, President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would allocate 1.5 billion euros — roughly $1.67 billion — to making public spaces accessible.)

Though the Olympic and Paralympic Games have touted accessibility efforts on behalf of athletes and spectators, some with disabilities pointed out the difficulty of daily life in Paris. Amaury Bost, who uses a wheelchair, participated in the “Marathon for All” held during the Olympics. He and the team of friends who pushed his all-terrain chair were featured in a video montage shown at the closing ceremony of those Games.

But Mr. Bost, a Paris resident who has used a wheelchair since 2011, is often challenged by the cobblestone, narrow or oddly inclined sidewalks near his home, according to his brother Benoît, his caregiver.

“So if you’re in a wheelchair, you’re dead,” Benoît Bost said. “That’s why you end up with electric wheelchairs on the road and not on the sidewalk.”

Accessibility at the Games

Spectators at the Games, which end Sept. 8, may briefly encounter the inclusive environment that wowed Ms. Skarstein, the Norwegian rower, and other athletes at the Paralympic Village.

“Each of the competition sites has been modified to ensure there will be fluid movement, whether it’s for an athlete, spectator or staff,” Ludivine Munos, the Games’ director of integration, said in a news conference Monday. Buses will ferry passengers from 10 of the largest Metro stations to the 13 Paralympics venues, which have dedicated drop-off zones.

Visually impaired fans at the Stade de France can request headsets that will show an enhanced version of the action displayed on the video boards around the venue. The headsets will also offer audio commentary. At rugby, blind football and goalball events, some fans will be able to follow the matches on touch tablets whose 3-D pieces slide around to indicate player movement.

Porte de la Chapelle Arena, the only venue built specifically for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, was built to be fully accessible. It is hosting badminton events during the Paralympics and will host concerts and games for Paris’s professional basketball team in the future.

For those seeking greater accessibility, it’s a start.

“It cannot be solved with a magic wand: Harry Potter doesn’t exist, unfortunately,” said Alexis Hanquinquant, a para triathlete competing for France. “But what we need to do is build on the legacy of the Paris Games so that every building, every renovation, every new construction can be 100 percent accessible.”

When Maria Innamorato heard last month that the Via Appia — known in English as the Appian Way — had been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, she rejoiced.

Ms. Innamorato, the deputy mayor of the town of Cisterna di Latina, Italy, felt the months of effort to craft a dossier detailing her town’s bona fides had finally paid off. But the joy was short-lived.

Later that same day, city officials were told that Cisterna, which is near Rome and is sliced in two by the modern iteration of the ancient road, was along one of the sections of the Appia that UNESCO experts had excluded from the heritage list.

Ms. Innamorato was stunned, as were officials from other towns that were shut out. “We still don’t really know why we were left off,” she said.

In all, three sections of the road, considered by many the world’s first highway, were passed over by experts for the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which evaluates candidates for the heritage list. The towns’ hopes of becoming new magnets for tourists, and their much-needed money, vanished.

Local officials whose towns lie along the road say their own national officials have let them down as well. Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, publicly acknowledged that Italy did not object to the decision to leave out some parts of the road. He and other officials feared any delay would have led to the country losing its bragging rights for having the most World Heritage sites.

By adding the Appia, Italy managed to stay just ahead of China, which also had another site listed this year. China now has 59 sites to Italy’s 60.

Beating out China “is something all Italians can be proud of,” Mr. Sangiuliano said during the celebration of the World Heritage designation last month. “This is a primacy that comes from our history, and it is something that we have to safeguard.”

Critics in the excluded sections of the Appia grumbled that the Culture Ministry was not respecting history, but instead sold out to beat the Chinese at the heritage game.

“We will oppose this with every means at our disposal, every means possible to vindicate our right to belong,” the mayor of Cisterna, Valentino Mantini, said.

Experts from the International Council on Monuments and Sites declined to respond to a request for clarification on their reasoning. But in adding the Appia to the list in July, a council’s representative said that the two excluded sections closest to Rome, which include Cisterna, had been left out because they included sites that were located on spurs just off the roadway instead of on the main road.

The shunned Italians huffed that such a ruling showed a basic lack of understanding of the beauty of highway networks.

Two of the excluded sections are in Lazio, the region that includes Rome; one is in Puglia, Italy’s heel.

Known as the “regina viarum,” or the queen of roads, the Appia was built by the Romans starting in 312 B.C. to allow them to move efficiently and to conquer the south of what is modern-day Italy.

Finished about 400 years later and extending to Brindisi, the road became an important trade route and an example of the excellence of Roman engineering. Many sections are still used today, running through fields, sheep tracks and towns.

Some sections still have the original ancient cobblestones. Others have been paved over, including a long, straight tract of road, about 25 pine-tree-lined miles that run from near Cisterna to the coast, that was used to break 20th century speed records.

For Cisterna, there was much more on the line than getting recognition from UNESCO. While so much of Italy is feeling overwhelmed by tourists — think Venice and the Cinque Terre — Cisterna is desperate for visitors. Making it to the World Heritage List was going to be the town’s ticket to revival.

Cisterna had been on a downward spiral in the decades before World War II, losing much of its political clout when Mussolini’s Fascist regime built a series of new towns in the drained Pontine Marshes. The towns jockeyed with Cisterna, which for centuries had been the only town for many miles.

Then, in 1944, Allied bombings and raids destroyed most of the city. The one historic palazzo that was spared now serves as Cisterna’s prized cultural hub, with a library, exhibition space and a room for ceremonies, civil weddings and the occasional concert.

For a city with little left, the Appia came to serve as an anchor to its past and a steppingstone for its future, said Danilo Di Camillo, the municipal worker in charge of culture.

Angela Maria Ferroni, a now retired Culture Ministry official who is widely touted as having masterminded Italy’s Appia bid, said other World Heritage sites like Venice or Pompeii attract “millions of visitors” regardless of the UNESCO imprimatur. But for neglected towns along the Appia, she said, a nod from the experts would have been “an important starting point” for their development.

In the UNESCO bid, Cisterna city officials showcased a local site first excavated in the 1990s: a road station that is cited in the Acts of the Apostles as the place where St. Paul had met some Christians from Rome on his travels to the city.

Local officials still hope that a previous plan to create a walking path along the Appia will come together. The Culture Ministry would like to replicate the success of the Camino de Santiago, which each year attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who walk along routes that lead to the burial site of St. James the Great in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Some 20 million euros were allocated toward the project, which has been bogged down by administrative setbacks. “Unfortunately, the hearsay about Italian bureaucracy exists,” said Luigi Scaroina, the Culture Ministry official in charge of the project. Securing paths where car traffic is heavy is also a concern, he said.

For those along the parts of the road that did win the UNESCO designation, there is optimism that the road will now be better recognized for the cultural treasure it is. Simone Quilici, director of the Appia Antica Archaeological Park, the curated cypress- and umbrella pine-lined segment of the road that begins in central Rome, noted that even this well-known portion of roadway gets only about 60,000 visitors a year, compared with the 12 million who visited the Colosseum last year.

At the Appia celebration, Mr. Sangiuliano, the culture minister, said he was certain that the omission of the three sections of road was “an easily resolvable problem” and pledged to “remedy” the situation. But that could take time because there is only one meeting a year to decide which sites will be inscribed on the World Heritage List. Regardless, when it comes to future decision-making by the Italian government, he said, local officials of the excluded areas will be treated as equals of those whose areas have been included in the site.

Mr. Mantini, the mayor, was only partly appeased. “I want the minister to send me a draft of the commemorative plaque I should put at the entrance of my city,” he said. “Should I write ‘Excluded,’ or ‘It’s there, but we can’t say it is’? Or ‘Part of the Appia patrimony of humanity’ or not?”

Even before the #MeToo movement rocked Hollywood and rippled around the globe, the film industry in India’s prosperous and progressive south had embarked on a reckoning of its own.

In early 2017, a superstar of Malayalam film was accused of hiring criminals to abduct and rape a female star in a brutal case of retaliation. That prompted the government of the state of Kerala, where the Malayalam film industry is based, to conduct an investigation into what had long been an open secret: that the male-dominated cinema was rife with sexual abuse and harassment.

The government promised safer work spaces for women in the industry. The actor went to jail, then got out on bail as his high-profile trial continued. But while the investigation’s report was completed in 2019, it was never made public, and the movement fizzled out before any justice was served — a sign of the widespread impunity in India for sexual violence and harassment.

Now, the movement has gotten a second wind, after media organizations and others filed a petition that forced the report’s release.

The report, while redacted to protect the privacy of both the victims and the powerful industry figures they accuse, offers damning evidence of widespread gender discrimination and sexual misconduct.

Exploitative practices, like seeking sexual favors for entry into the field and landing movie roles, were prevalent. Basic safety for women, such as separate bathrooms or changing rooms, was neglected. Gender pay gaps were large, and female actors, technicians, makeup artists and dancers were deprived of legally binding contracts.

In the roughly two weeks since the report’s release, more victims have emerged with more stories of abuse. Some of the most powerful men in Malayalam cinema have resigned from their posts in industry organizations, in some cases because they were directly accused of sexual misconduct and are facing criminal investigations.

The #MeToo revival in the Malayalam film industry has come as the country is gripped by protests over another gruesome case of sexual violence in the workplace: the rape and murder of a female doctor in Kolkata after a long shift at work.

The release of the report has offered a measure of vindication for the victims and other women who spoke up years ago and faced widespread retaliation, with many struggling to find work, while the accused actor, known as Dileep, remained free and continued on to even bigger hits.

The report, which was compiled by what is known as the Hema Committee, named for the female judge who led the inquiry, turned to poetic language to describe the ugly reality among the industry’s stars. “The sky is full of mysteries, with the twinkling stars and the beautiful moon,” the report said. “But scientific investigation revealed that stars do not twinkle, nor does the moon look beautiful.”

The Kerala government has faced severe criticism over its handling of the matter. The state’s chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, is seen as having protected the rich and powerful in the film industry by having the report withheld. While Malayalam cinema is much smaller than the Hindi cinema of Bollywood, its leaders and stars wield enormous influence in South India.

The rot in Malayalam cinema remained under the surface even as it projected a progressive image and tackled sensitive subjects that mainstream Bollywood and India’s other regional cinemas did not.

J. Devika, a feminist historian who studies culture in modern Kerala, said that the report would merely be “eyewash” unless it led to justice and change.

“Their inaction since its release and their reluctance to release it in the first place shows a lack of political will to bring about any change,” she said of the Kerala government. The government, she added, is “politically progressive but socially and culturally conservative.”

Two news organizations, The News Minute and Newslaundry, collaborated on an investigation that detailed how Dileep, the actor, had gotten away with what they called the “orchestrated nightmare” of the alleged abduction and rape. The news organizations said the case showed how deeply rooted misogyny was, even in a seemingly progressive state.

Dileep has repeatedly cast himself as a victim, both questioning the credibility of the survivor’s accusations and minimizing her success and talent. Seven years later, the legal case against him is still pending trial.

Since the report’s release, the entire executive committee of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists has resigned. That organization, the regional cinema’s premier organizing body, is accused of maintaining a silence that enabled abusers. So are several big-name male stars.

Female artists have banded together to form a collective that is pushing for a wider investigation into problems in the industry. Their efforts saw that an Internal Complaints Committee, mandated under an Indian law on sexual harassment in workplaces, was set up on film sets too.

But members of the collective said that female actors and groups like theirs were left to bear the “unfair burden” of seeking basic dignity and safety.

“We are film professionals, not activists,” said Bina Paul, one of the founding members of the collective. “The onus is on the civil society, as much as on the women, to speak up.”

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.

Ukraine is investigating the crash this week of one of the few F-16 fighter jets that had been delivered to the country by its allies in NATO, and was already collaborating with the United States to try to determine what happened, the head of Ukraine’s air force said on Friday.

At the same time, a Western official who has been briefed on the preliminary investigation said that there are “indications” that friendly fire from a Patriot missile battery might be involved in the crash.

The United States has supplied Ukraine with Patriots, which include a powerful radar system and mobile launchers that fire missiles at incoming projectiles, and the Ukrainian military has used them frequently as part of its defense against Russian aerial attacks.

One possibility being explored is whether a Patriot battery might have accidentally fired at the plane, the official said. A second possibility is system malfunction.

Ukraine said on Thursday that the plane was destroyed on Monday during a combat mission to repel a barrage of Russian missiles and drones. The loss of the plane is a significant blow to Ukraine’s effort to integrate the aircraft into its war effort, and to convince NATO allies that it can efficiently handle sophisticated western weapons.

The pilot who died in the crash, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, was one of the few who had been trained to fly the complex aircraft.

The F-16’s, as well as other aspects of U.S. military aid to Ukraine, promised to be on the table at a scheduled meeting in Washington on Friday between the American defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, and Ukraine’s minister of defense, Rustem Umerov.

Ukraine took delivery of a small number of F-16s just a few weeks ago. Allies in Europe have promised the country 45 of the fighter aircraft, but so far only about six are believed to have arrived.

The aircraft, delivered after many months of pressure by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other senior officials, are the most high-profile piece of military hardware supplied by the country’s allies since Russia launched its full scale invasion of the country 30 months ago.

As such, they have become a symbol of Ukraine’s defense and their pilots were considered by many people to be national heroes.

“We will find out the causes of the air disaster,” said the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleschuk, in a post on the Telegram social media app on Friday. “We have to thoroughly understand what happened, the circumstances, and whose responsibility it is.”

An official at South Korea’s top military intelligence agency leaked classified data, including a list of undercover operatives, to a suspected Chinese intelligence agent for years in exchange for cash, defense officials said Friday.

The 49-year-old civilian employee at the Korea Defense Intelligence Command was arrested last month and formally indicted Tuesday on charges including bribery and handing over sensitive data, via documents or voice messages, 30 times since 2019.

The leaked information included a list of undercover agents from the command who were operating in China, Russia and other countries, military prosecutors said at a briefing this week, according to the defense ministry. The command specializes in spying on North Korea, a heavily militarized country that often threatens ​its southern neighbor.

The leak has raised awkward questions for South Korea because it comes at a time when the country is expanding military intelligence sharing with the United States and Japan to help guard against North Korea and China. South Korea and the United States have depended on each other to spy on North Korea, combining resources such as satellites, cyber intelligence and human agents, like those working for the command.

The leak, first uncovered in June, has prompted the Defense Intelligence Command, one of South Korea’s most secretive government agencies, to recall undercover agents based overseas back home.

Undercover agents have been active in China, where they have tried to recruit spies and collect intelligence among North Koreans who traveled there or among ethnic Koreans in China who often traveled to North Korea. But their undercover identities were sometimes exposed and they became targets of the authorities in China as well as undercover North Korean counterintelligence agents operating there.

Investigators are still assessing the scale of damage done to South Korea’s decades-old intelligence war against North Korea, as South Korean lawmakers and media have voiced suspicions that the data may have eventually gone to Pyongyang.

The indicted official, whose identity was not revealed by prosecutors, was secretly detained and blackmailed into working for the suspected Chinese agent in Yanji in northeastern China, in April 2017, according to military prosecutors. He was in the city, near the North Korean border, to check on his intelligence-gathering network there, they said.

He printed documents, and took memos or screenshots of classified documents, as well as taking cellphone pictures of them. He smuggled them out and sent them through China-based, password-protected cloud services or through a voice-messaging function within an online gaming app. In return, he has received at least $120,000 from his Chinese contact, military prosecutors said.

“Check the file I have sent,” the official was quoted as saying in a message to his Chinese contact. “If you pay me more, I will share more.”

Criminal charges brought against the official included taking bribes and violating laws on protecting military intelligence. Prosecutors said they were still investigating whether the suspected Chinese agent was linked to North Korea.

The South Korean intelligence authorities first learned of a possible leak at the command after their hacker discovered a list of South Korean undercover agents while snooping on North Korean computer networks, according to the office of Kim Min-seok, a senior lawmaker at South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party, which first alerted media to the breach.

The last time a major leak was reported at the command was in 2018, when an affiliated active-duty military officer was found to have sold classified information to foreign agents in China and Japan through a retired South Korean intelligence officer. The information he sold reportedly included data on the command’s agents in China and on North Korean weaponry.

“The latest case raises serious questions about the ethics of an agent — this kind of leak threatened the lives of other South Korean agents abroad — and about the system that has failed to catch him for so long,” said Yoo Dong-ryul, a security analyst and head of the Korea Institute of Liberal Democracy who has been studying the intelligence war between the two Koreas.

It was still unclear how extensive the latest leak was. Investigators did not cite any of the exposed agents or informants as operating inside North Korea. The leak did include information on the command’s structure and operational methods, they said.

Kim Yong-hyun, who was appointed as defense minister earlier this month, vowed to take “extraordinary measures” to address any problems discovered during the investigation.

The Defense Intelligence Command’s undercover agents did some of South Korea’s most dangerous spy work. Unlike other agents who operated with diplomatic immunity, many of them did not carry diplomatic visas, and posed as businessmen, which left them vulnerable to arrests, threats and blackmail in countries like China.

One such agent helped the manager of a North Korean restaurant in China defect to South Korea with a dozen waitresses in 2016.

But in 1998, a lieutenant colonel at the command who was working undercover in Dandong, a Chinese city near its border with North Korea, was kidnapped to North Korea. After he was released six months later, he revealed during his debriefing that North Korean interrogators tortured and blackmailed him with threats to kill his family in the South.

The officer was released only after he identified other South Korean undercover agents in northeastern China and promised to work as a double agent for the North, according to “Covert Operations,” a 2018 book about the undercover agents.