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GREENSBORO — The former sergeant and a detective from the Greensboro Police Department's now-defunct Special Intelligence unit were indicted Monday for felony obstruction of justice and allegedly hacking into a government computer.

The only criminal charges to stem from a police department scandal that went public in 2005 and led to the forced resignation of former Chief David Wray, the felony indictments by the grand jury were against Sgt. Tom Fox, who supervised Special Intelligence, and Officer Scott Sanders.

Both officers are currently on suspension, police officials said. North Carolina police officers are certified through the state Department of Justice. A felony conviction would result in the certification being withdrawn, as would some misdemeanors.

According to charging documents signed by the state's special prosecutor, James Coman, Sanders in 2003 misled an SBI agent into breaking into a Department of Housing and Urban Development computer assigned to a fellow police officer Sanders was investigating, Julius Fulmore.

Sanders and his sergeant were also charged with obstructing justice by allegedly telling Greensboro and Winston-Salem officers not to allow two Special Intelligence detectives, Norman Rankin and Ernest Cuthbertson, access to a confidential witness they needed to interview.

"We don't want this investigation to go forward. We want it to fail," Sanders is quoted as telling the officers, in the presence of his sergeant.

"The clear implication," the indictment alleges, "was to portray officers Rankin and Cuthbertson in a bad light and imply they were 'dirty cops' and 'couldn't be trusted.'"

According to a lawsuit filed in May against the police department by former vice-narcotics Officer Fulmore, Fulmore had been issued a computer by HUD during a fraud investigation.

Among the allegations in Fulmore's lawsuit are that the computer was seized and broken into by fellow officers as part of a long-running conspiracy to damage Fulmore's career and reputation.

The rank and file under the Wray administration nicknamed the Special Intelligence unit "the secret police." Although the unit's primary official mission was to gather intelligence on gangs and hate groups, members of the team became increasingly occupied with internal investigations of fellow officers suspected of corruption.

After the unit was shut down in 2006, city officials said investigators found on Sanders' computer "hundreds and hundreds of hours" of conversations the detective secretly recorded. So far, only seven minutes have been released — a conversation in which Sanders and the deputy chief discussed how to rid then-chief Wray of a meddlesome neighbor who lived next door to Wray's condo.

Attorneys for Sanders have not explained the reason for the recordings, and Wray's lawyer said previously that Wray was not aware at the time that Sanders was recording his superiors. During a city-commissioned investigation of the matter, investigators suggested that Sanders made the recordings as an insurance policy. Investigator Michael Longmire told the deputy chief that Sanders, referred to by his nickname "Scooter," had been advised by fellow officers to get everything on tape.

"'Scooter, this is so unusual,'" Longmire, in questioning Brady, quoted the officers as telling Sanders, "'you know, so unusual for a detective to have the authority of the deputy chief, that you need to be careful and dot all your i's and cross all your t's, because if something goes wrong, you're going to be the fall guy."

Thus far, the officers have shown a united front, and several — Sanders, R.E. Edwards, Brian Bissett and Brady — are represented by the same attorney, Seth Cohen.