A public-access computer at a Prague hotel contained the passport numbers and itineraries of about 200 leaders from EU member states, the Finnish News Agency (STT) learned on Friday.
The list includes Tarja Halonen, the Finnish president, and Matti Vanhanen (centre), the prime minister.
The Czech Republic, the country holding the EU's rotating presidency, said the data had been removed from the hotel computer and that the incident had been caused by human error.
Michaela Jelinkova, a spokesperson of the Czech deputy prime minister for European affairs, said in a statement that the leak had been traced to "a personal failure of one of our employees"."As the leak represents a serious breach of working obligations, we have taken the necessary personal policy measures," the minister added."It needs to be emphasised that the file did not contain any confidential information according to the Czech law. It has contained solely data for our working needs."
The Finnish Security Police said it was alarming to discover that a public computer had contained data of such a sensitive nature but added that the breach presented more of a nuisance than an actual security threat. Prague played host to an EU-US summit earlier this month. The data were discovered by a Finn who used the computer after the summit.
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