UK Defence Minister John Healey said the leak was not revealed because of the risk that the Taliban authorities would obtain the data set and the lives of Afghans would be put at risk.

As the mood fouls over immigration policy, British officials bicker over the decision to allow thousands of Afghans who had not qualified for asylum

According to a BBC report, the personal details of 19,000 Afghans who had applied to move to the United Kingdom following the 2021 Taliban takeover were leaked in February 2022. The government learned of the data breach in August 2023 and created a secret resettlement scheme for those affected,

Tory ex-ministers reportedly tried to stop 24,000 Afghans being housed in the UK after a data breach released details of people trying to flee Kabul.

A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stripping deportation protections from thousands of Afghans in the country.

More than half a million Afghans have been expelled from Iran in the 16 days since the conflict with Israel ended, according to the United Nations, in what may be one of the largest forced movements of population this decade.

The pace and scale of Afghans returning from Iran are overwhelming already fragile support systems, a senior U.N. official warned Tuesday, with tens of thousands of people crossing the border daily exhausted and traumatized,