Feds Make First Arrest in Connection With BP Spill

The Justice Department on Tuesday made its first arrest in connection with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, charging a former BP drilling engineer with destroying evidence sought by federal authorities investigating the April 2010 environmental disaster.

The Associated Press reports that Kurt Mix, 50, is accused of deleting roughly 300 text messages with a BP supervisor that recounted the oil company's failing efforts to cap the runaway well. Mix allegedly deleted around 200 messages from his iPhone in October 2010 and another 100 messages in August of the following year after learning that his electronic files were set to be collected.

The Justice Department alleges that those messages—some of which were later recovered forensically—included sensitive internal information collected in real-time as BP engineers struggled to plug the well that shows the company intentionally underreported the scope of the disaster.

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