Brazil police nab four in Petrobras theft

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Brazilian police arrested four port security guards on Thursday for the theft of equipment and data from Brazil's state energy giant Petrobras, and said they no longer considered the crime an act of industrial espionage.

Petrobras (PETR4.SA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)(PBR.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said earlier this month that four laptops and two memory chips were stolen in late January from a transport container owned by the U.S. oil-field service company Halliburton (HAL.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), a longtime Petrobras business partner.

Police originally said they were treating the theft as a case of industrial espionage.

The data came from a drilling ship in the Santos basin, where a huge new oil reserve was discovered last year. The find could make Brazil one of the world's major oil producers.

Police superintendant Valdinho Jacinto Caetano told a news conference in Rio de Janeiro that the four people arrested were guards for a logistics company named Briclog that worked in the port area.

They had been involved in pilfering before, he said.

"With these arrests, the theft of the computers is resolved. We've dismissed the theory that companies were looking for confidential information, piracy, or something industrial. We have established it was a common crime. They had no idea what was inside the computers," he said.

Four laptops were recovered but other equipment had been resold or destroyed, he said. (Reporting by Rodrigo Viga Gaier; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Vicki Allen)