Passports of presidential candidates breached

The passport records of presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and John McCain have been breached, a US official said.

The news came just days after the State Department revealed that it had sacked two employees and disciplined a third, for improperly accessing the passport details of Democratic front-runner Barack Obama.

The department has promised to launch an investigation into the security breaches and has apologised to the three presidential candidates.

Clinton's file was accessed last summer by an unauthorised trainee hired to help relieve the backlog of passport applications at the time, said State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack.

He said the department also detected earlier this year that McCain's passport file was accessed by one of the same people who looked at Obama's file.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said she has personally spoken with Obama about the incident.

She said: "I told him that I was sorry and I told him that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file and therefore, I will stay on top of it and get to the bottom of it."

McCormack later said that Rice had also called Clinton and would speak with McCain, who was travelling in Europe.

He said: "Secretary Rice expressed the same sentiments to Senator Clinton, and I would expect that she would say the same thing to Senator McCain: We're sorry that this happened and ... We're going to do a full investigation."

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