Watch live as defence secretary John Healey addresses MPs after it was revealed the Ministry of Defence used a gagging order to cover up a major data breach that put the lives of nearly 100,000 Afghans at risk of being killed by the Taliban.
The breach, which can now be reported on following the lifting of a super-injunction, occurred in February 2022 when a Royal Marine accidentally sent an email with a link to a spreadsheet which included the details of 25,000 Afghans who were trying to claim asylum.
It came to light the following year when an anonymous Facebook user posted snippets of the data. The posts remained on the site for three days until the MoD contacted Meta who then removed them.
Following the breach, the government offered asylum to the Afghans affected due to fears that they would be at risk of reprisal attacks from the Taliban if the terrorist organisation found out they were trying to flee.
Over 16,000 Afghans were evacuated to the UK without MPs or the public knowing, in the UK’s largest ever covert peacetime evacuation at a cost of £6billion.
A review into the leak, which was commissioned in January 2025, later found that the government’s efforts to stop the data from falling into the hands of the Taliban “inadvertently” made the data appear more valuable.
