Information that led to Afghan superinjunction being lifted was available last year, government admits
The major leak in February 2022 exposed the personal information of 18,700 Afghans seeking sanctuary in Britain, prompting an unprecedented court order banning any details of the leak from being revealed amid fears it would fall into the hands of the Taliban and put up to 100,000 people at risk.
It was finally lifted on Tuesday, after a review commissioned by defence secretary John Healey, which concluded in June, found that the threat of danger to those on the list was not significant.
Now, it has emerged that defence intelligence officials, who advised the government on the need for the superinjunction, had access to the same information last year.
In a written response to a High Court judge's demands for further investigation on why the order could not be lifted sooner, a senior government official admitted that a large amount of the information the review ordered by the defence secretary was based on was already known to the Ministry of Defence.
Defence official Dominic Wilson said that the crucial review of the response to the data breach was 'based to a substantial extent on information available at an earlier stage and considered by Defence Intelligence'.
The case for maintaining the superinjunction, which was in place for nearly two years, was largely based on assessments from defence intelligence officials who argued that thousands of lives would be at risk of death if it were reported that the data loss had occurred.
However, the government's review, led by the former deputy head of Defence Intelligence, Paul Rimmer, concluded that, while extrajudicial killings do occur, alongside other targeting of former Afghan officials, 'it appears unlikely that merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting'.
'Should the Taliban wish to target individuals, the wealth of data inherited from the former [Afghan] government would already enable them to do so,' it continued.
After receiving a copy of Mr Rimmer's review, the judge who heard the case, Mr Justice Chamberlain, 'expressed a concern that early assessments by MoD about risk, upon which the superinjunction ultimately rested, might have been reached without full consideration by the MoD of relevant information', Mr Wilson explained.
The judge was concerned that the government 'could have reached, much sooner, the view about risks that is set out in the Rimmer Review and which led to the decision to seek the discharge of the injunction', the statement added.
Lifting the order on Tuesday, Mr Justice Chamberlain said the conclusions of the review 'fundamentally undermine the evidential basis' on which the injunction, and the decisions to keep it in place, relied upon.
Responding to the latest revelation, a Downing Street spokesperson said questions over why the superinjunction wasn't lifted sooner 'need looking at properly, which is why we would welcome the Defence SC reviewing".
On Wednesday, Sir Keir Starmer expressed his anger over the cover-up and said Tory ministers have 'serious questions to answer'.
Meanwhile, the Commons Defence Committee has launched an inquiry into the breach, vowing to get to the bottom of what went so catastrophically wrong.
And Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons committee for science innovation and technology, has said she will write to the Information Commissioner to push for an investigation.
She is calling for a rethink on why it has so far declined to hold its own probe, despite previously issuing a fine of £305,000 for a much smaller MoD data breach.
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The Guardian
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Sky News
22 minutes ago
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Sky News
26 minutes ago
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Nigel Farage says ex-Reform chair liking antisemitic post about Robert Jenrick and his family is 'one little mistake'
Nigel Farage has said Reform's ex-chairman made "one little mistake" by liking an antisemitic social media post about senior Tory Robert Jenrick and his Jewish wife. Asked to respond to Mr Jenrick calling for Zia Yusuf, who heads up Reform 's 'DOGE' unit, to be sacked over the post, Mr Farage told Sky News: "Everyone makes mistakes. "Robert Jenrick in government made a lot more mistakes than Zia making one little mistake for which he immediately apologised." An anonymous X account posted a video appearing to show Mr Yusuf's account had liked a post on Friday which said: "Reminder that Jenrick is a traitorous Zogbot with a Jewish wife and family." A Zogbot is slang for a conspiracy theory claiming that Jews secretly control Western governments. Mr Yusuf, a multimillionaire businessman, said one of his team "accidentally pressed like on an awful antisemitic tweet" and said: "I apologise for this." He said the post is "equally racist against me" as it refers to "brown savages". "Clearly it was not intentional", he said as he claimed the amount of antisemitism and racism on X is "spiralling out of control". But Mr Jenrick said he calls "bulls***" on Mr Yusuf's claim that it was a team member and a mistake. "You've spent the last 48 hours calling me a 'traitor' for not drawing attention to a leaked spreadsheet with our special forces and MI6 officers' names on," the Conservative tweeted. "But we're meant to believe this tweet attacking me as a traitor for having a Jewish wife and family was liked "accidentally" by "one of the team." You must think we're all thick. "No. The mask has slipped. Likes are private. You thought nobody would ever know. Unfortunately for you, the racist account who posted the tweet and could see the likes exposed you.
