MoD offered to speed up resettlement case of Afghan who posted data breach names on Facebook

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The Ministry of Defence offered to expedite the review of a rejected resettlement application of an Afghan national after he posted sensitive details from a data breach on Facebook, the BBC understands.

The man published nine names from a dataset containing details of thousands of Afghans who applied to be relocated to the UK after the Taliban seized power, and indicated he could release the rest.

He obtained the details after they were sent out from UK Special Forces headquarters in an accidental data breach in February 2022.

British authorities tracked the man down and strongly requested he take the data down, offering an expedited review of his rejected resettlement application in return.

The BBC understands the man is now in the UK, having had his rejected application overturned. He is not believed to be facing any criminal charges in relation to his conduct.

Government sources close to the process told the BBC the individual had essentially blackmailed his way into the country using the leaked dataset.

When asked about the actions of the individual and his subsequent relocation to the UK, the MoD declined to comment on the case.

Johnny Mercer, the former veterans minister, who was covered by the super-injunction because of his knowledge of the events, told the BBC the breach was representative of the "chaos" around the relocation process, and the individual brought to the UK had used the data to get in.

"He put the names on Facebook and essentially bribed the MoD to get in the country. The Ministry of Defence offered to expedite his case and next thing you know he's in the UK," Mercer said.

"There were multiple data leaks from the MoD regarding these applications. I think that gives you some sense of the chaos and lack of care in how things were being run at that time."

The breach occurred in February 2022 after someone working in UK Special Forces (UKSF) headquarters accidentally emailed the personal data of every applicant to the UK's Afghan resettlement scheme to date – nearly 19,000 people – to someone outside government.

The data was sent to an Afghan person living in the UK, who passed the information onto others, including people in Afghanistan. One individual in Afghanistan, after having his application rejected, posted some of the data on Facebook.

Alerting a defence minister to the presence of the data on Facebook in August 2023, an MoD case worker helping people seeking relocation called the possibility the Taliban might get hold of it "bone-chilling".

The data came from the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) resettlement scheme, set up in 2021 as the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan.

It was highly sensitive because Afghan nationals who worked with the British government during the conflict with the Taliban were at risk of serious harm and even execution with the group back in power.

The breach led to the previous government setting up a secret £850m emergency resettlement scheme to bring some of those in the database to the UK.

Both the breach and subsequent scheme were kept secret by an unprecedented super-injunction, until it was lifted by High Court judge Mr Justice Chamberlain on Tuesday.

The emergency scheme – known as the Afghanistan Response Route and set up in April 2024 – has resulted in about 4,500 Afghans being brought to the UK so far, with a further 2,400 expected.

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Vast majority of ‘kill list’ Afghans’ asylum claims were ‘not genuine’



As few as one in 16 Afghans identified in a data breach had genuine claims for asylum, defence sources have said, raising fresh questions about how many claimants who were not genuine might have slipped through the net.

More than 100,000 people were trying to get to Britain in 2022 on the grounds that they had fought alongside or helped British forces, or were related to someone who had, before the Allied withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Multiple sources have told The Telegraph that the “vast majority” of them had no right to come to the UK because they had no connection to the Armed Forces.

The disclosure that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) believed that only a tiny proportion of those claiming asylum were genuine helps to explain why the Home Office raised concerns on national security grounds about the scheme to bring them to the UK.

A Royal Marine was trying to sift out false claimants when he emailed a list of almost 19,000 names to what he thought were trusted contacts, only for it to fall into the wrong hands.

It was this that led to the government being granted a super-injunction to prevent the media or MPs from discussing the data breach. It also prevented any reporting of an emergency airlift to the UK of some of the people named on the list.

The Government says that to date, 6,900 people, comprising 1,500 people who were on the leaked list plus dependents, have been brought to the UK.

But the High Court was told in a previously secret hearing relating to the injunction that the true figure was 16,156, and that 42,000 people in total were eligible to be brought to the UK.

One senior source who was involved with Operation Rubific – the codename for the Government’s response to the data breach – told The Telegraph that for every genuine claimant, there were thought to be 15 that were not genuine.

MoD sources confirmed that the “vast majority” of those who claimed for resettlement in the UK were “ineligible”.

The leaked list named people who had made an application under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap), a scheme for the relocation of those who had helped the British Armed Forces.

In response to the data breach, the Government secretly set up another programme, the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR), to grant asylum to those whose lives were now deemed to be in danger.

MoD sources said the proportion of genuine to not genuine claimants on the leaked list was similar to the proportion on the Arap list, when relatives are taken into account, and that most of those on the leaked list had already been rejected for resettlement to the UK.

Because there was no parliamentary or press scrutiny of the ARR programme, MPs are only now able to ask questions about whether claimants who were not genuine made it to the UK under the scheme, after the super-injunction was lifted by a judge on Tuesday.