CALGARY (AP) - Police and U.S. Secret Service officials insisted there was no security breach when a confidential document outlining the movements of some Group of Eight summit leaders was found by a British journalist Thursday.
The British reporter found the 134-page document, titled Program Events and Protocol and stamped "confidential," in a busy picnic area outside the main security barrier leading to the resort in the Rockies where the annual G-8 summit was held.
The document contained details on seating inside British Prime Minister Tony Blair's helicopter, diagrams of meeting rooms, phone numbers for entourage officials and other sensitive information, U.S. Secret Service officials said.
It included room diagrams that showed the locations of windows and where each leader would sit - information security officials would need to counter the threat of sniper fire, the Times of London reported. The newspaper ran a front-page report on the document, headlined "I Find Summit Security Papers Abandoned in Picnic Area."
Police confirmed a document was found but said it did not compromise the safety of summit leaders or officials.
"The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reviewed the document in question and found it posed no security threat," Const. Max Johann said.
He had no further details on how the document was lost and other officials did not immediately return phone calls.
Secret Service spokesman Jim Macken said the document was assembled by the G-8 for officials briefing the news media and one of the officials had misplaced it. He was not certain which country that person was from but he said the person was not from the United States.
This year's summit was held under the tightest security in Canada since the Second World War, with thousands of military forces deployed to protect a 13-kilometre-wide security zone.
There was only one paved road leading to the summit site. Soldiers with automatic weapons were stationed at half-kilometre intervals as Bush's motorcade arrived.
In February, the U.S. Secret Service acknowledged an agent shopping for souvenirs left behind a document outlining security plans for Vice-President Dick Cheney's appearance at the Winter Olympics.
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