Taxpayer could face £1bn compensation bill for Afghan leak victims
A vast data breach involving the details of 18,800 soldiers, along with about 6,000 of their family members, was revealed on Tuesday after a superinjunction was lifted by the High Court, allowing The Telegraph and other national newspapers to expose the scandal.
It can now be revealed that a law firm is suing the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on behalf of at least 1,000 Afghans who claim they were affected by the breach.
Manchester-based Barings Law hopes to claim £50,000 from the MoD for each individual involved in the breach, sources have said.
If all 18,800 soldiers make a successful claim, the compensation bill could be as high as £940 million.
That sum could grow if any of the Afghan soldiers' family members join the legal claim, taking it towards £1 billion in total.
Hidden from the public
The breach occurred in February 2022, when a Royal Marine emailed a group of Afghans, accidentally including a spreadsheet containing the identities of nearly 25,000 Afghans – soldiers who had worked with the British Army, as well as their family members – who were applying for asylum.
The leak came to light in 2023, when an anonymous Facebook user posted extracts of the data on the social media site.
MoD officials contacted Meta, the company that owns Facebook, and the posts were deleted within three days. However, the Government decided it had no choice but to offer asylum to the Afghans affected because the leak had left them at risk of reprisal attacks from the Taliban.
The breach has only just come to public attention after an unprecedented superinjunction was lifted by the High Court.
Adnan Malik, head of data protection at Barings Law, said: 'This is an incredibly serious data breach, which the Ministry of Defence has repeatedly tried to hide from the British public.
'It involved the loss of personal and identifying information about Afghan nationals who have helped British forces to defeat terrorism and support security and stability in the region.
'Through its careless handling of such sensitive information, the Ministry of Defence has put multiple lives at risk, damaged its own reputation, and put the success of future operations in jeopardy by eroding trust in its data security measures.'
To date, the leak is understood to have cost £400 million to relocate victims of the leak. A further £850 million has been set aside to complete the resettlement of those affected, but it is not believed that this includes any potential compensation costs.
The MoD was fined £350,000 for a very similar – but separate – data breach in 2023 that came to public light.
The details of 265 Afghans were accidentally leaked two years before, in 2021, after an email was sent copying in a list of addresses in the 'to' field of the message rather than the 'bcc' field, which hides other recipients.
Regulators from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) handed down the penalty in December 2023.
Court papers seen by The Telegraph indicate that the ICO was made aware of the far larger Afghan data breach in 2023, but were sworn to secrecy.
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