Clueless official spills his secret relationship on the Internet

Nothing is safe on the Internet, but nothing is safe from ignorance as well.

A married Chinese government official managed to compromise himself on a Chinese micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo, because he didn’t know the messages were open to everyone.

Xie Zhiqiang, head of the Liyang City Sanitation Bureau, was fired on June 21, when he was discovered using Weibo to arrange illicit meetings with a woman presumed to be his mistress.

Xie made an account in the site thinking it was a private messaging service, and then started to exchange flirtatious messages with the woman.

Even after gathering thousand ‘followers,’ he didn’t know his messages were public.

“How did you see them? They’re not visible, right?” Mr. Xie said to the Modern Express, newspaper affiliated with the state-run Xinhua news agency, “You saw all the Weibos (messages) we sent to each other? It can’t be.”

His Weibo account, Weilini5125, got deleted with all the messages, his last message before deletion was, “sorry.” The mistress is keeping her account however, her last message asking to be left alone.

An official from a government propaganda office confirmed that an investigation into the affair has already been launched.