LONDON — Thousands of Afghans including many who worked with British forces have been secretly resettled in the U.K. after a leak of data on their identities raised fears that they could be targeted by the Taliban, the British government revealed Tuesday.
The government now plans to close the secret route.
Defense Secretary John Healey said a dataset containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had applied to come to Britain after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was released in error in 2022, and extracts were later published online.
That prompted the then-Conservative government to set up a secret program to resettle the Afghans. The government obtained a court order known as a superinjunction that barred anyone from revealing its existence.
The injunction was lifted on Tuesday in conjunction with a decision by Britain's current Labour Party government to make the program public. It said an independent review had found little evidence that the leaked data would expose Afghans to greater risk of retribution from the Taliban.
"I have felt deeply concerned about the lack of transparency to Parliament and the public," Healey told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
About 4,500 people – 900 applicants and approximately 3,600 family members — have been brought to Britain under the secret program, and about 6,900 people are expected to be relocated by the time it closes, at a total cost of 850 million pounds ($1.1 billion).
About 36,000 more Afghans have been relocated to the U.K. under other resettlement routes.
British troops were sent to Afghanistan as part of a deployment against al-Qaida and Taliban forces in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. At the peak of the operation there were almost 10,000 British troops in the country, mostly in Helmand province in the south. Britain ended combat operations in 2014.
