LONDON (Reuters) -Britain set up a secret scheme to relocate thousands of Afghans to the UK after a soldier accidentally disclosed the personal details of more than 33,000 people, putting them at risk of reprisals from the Taliban, court documents showed on Tuesday.
A judge at London’s High Court said in a May 2024 judgment first made public on Tuesday that about 20,000 people may have to be offered relocation to Britain, a move that would likely cost “several billion pounds”.
Britain’s current defence minister John Healey said that around 4,500 affected people “are in Britain or in transit … at a cost of around 400 million pounds”.
The government is also facing lawsuits from those affected by the breach, further adding to the ultimate cost of the incident.
A Ministry of Defence-commissioned review of the data breach, a summary of which was also published on Tuesday, said more than 16,000 people affected by it had been relocated to the UK as of May this year.
The British government was forced to act after the breach revealed the names of Afghans who had helped British forces in Afghanistan before they withdrew from the country in chaotic circumstances in 2021.
The details emerged on Tuesday after a legal ruling known as a superinjunction was lifted. The injunction had been granted in 2023 after the MoD argued that a public disclosure of the breach could put people at risk of extra-judicial killing or serious violence by the Taliban.
The dataset contained personal information of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had applied to be relocated to Britain and their families.
It was released in error in early 2022, before the MoD spotted the breach in August 2023, when part of the dataset was published on Facebook.
The former Conservative government obtained the injunction the following month.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s centre-left government, which was elected last July, launched a review into the injunction, the breach and the relocation scheme, which found that although Afghanistan remains dangerous, there was little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin, writing by Kate Holton, editing by Hugh Lawson)
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