RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil: The theft of oil company computers containing what the president called "state secrets" turned out to be a case of common robbery, police said Thursday

Police arrested four security guards at the port of Macae, a coastal city in Rio de Janeiro state, and recovered laptops and hard drives that were stolen from a container at a Petroleo Brasileiro SA port storage site earlier this month, federal police inspector Valdinho Jacinto Caetano said.


The robbery of information about two major oil and gas finds reverberated at the highest levels of the government. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva described the lost data as "state secrets."

The stolen equipment owned by Petrobras contractor Halliburton Co. contained confidential Petrobras data on Brazil's latest deep-water finds: The Tupi field in the Atlantic Ocean, which Petrobras says has much as 8 billion barrels of light crude, and the Jupiter field off the coast of Rio, which could be just as big.

The suspects, employees of a security company hired by Petrobras to guard the port, had been carrying out small thefts since September that went unnoticed until the computers disappeared, Caetano said. They face charges of criminal conspiracy.