More than 16,000 Afghans were secretly brought to the UK in the largest covert peacetime evacuation after the MoD put them in danger of being targeted by the Taliban. Social affairs correspondent Holl

Over 18,000 Afghan citizens eligible to relocate to the UK under a government programme to protect them from the Taliban were put at risk in a heretofore unreportable data breach.

Sean Humber, from law firm Leigh Day, said that a data breach of thousands of Afghans’ personal information was ‘catastrophic’.

After a leak at the Ministry of Defence, officials faced a race to keep up to 100,000 Afghans from the Taliban’s clutches – with two years of court fights and rescue plans projected to cost billions,

The former defence secretary says erring on the side of caution was "entirely justified" after the 2022 breach.

Penny Mordaunt has said the person behind the MoD data breach should lose their job to show that the incident was "wrong".

Sensitive details exposed by the huge Afghan data breach that put tens of thousands of people at risk were revealed by the defence secretary – but the media are still banned from reporting them.John Healey offered a “sincere apology” on behalf of the British Government for a massive leak which shared information about Afghans seeking to escape to the UK because of their links to British troops and could only be reported after a two-year fight to lift an unprecedented superinjunction.