{"id":270907,"date":"2025-07-18T02:36:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T02:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/270907\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T02:36:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T02:36:11","slug":"why-thousands-of-afghans-were-secretly-relocated-to-the-uk-podcast-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/270907\/","title":{"rendered":"Why thousands of Afghans were secretly relocated to the UK \u2013 podcast | Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">This week an email was sent to people in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/afghanistan\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Afghanistan<\/a>. It told the recipients, who had all worked for British forces in Afghanistan, that some of their personal data \u201cmay have been compromised\u201d. All had applied for asylum in the UK, fearful because their work for Britain made them a target for the Taliban. Now they were told their asylum applications had been leaked into the public domain.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">They were advised not to take phone calls or respond to messages or emails from unknown contacts, to limit access to their social media, to consider closing their accounts, and to only go online via a private connection. Understandably, they were terrified.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian\u2019s defence and security editor, tells Helen Pidd how 24 hours later, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/john-healey\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">John Healey<\/a>, the defence secretary, apologised for probably the biggest \u2013 and most expensive \u2014 data leak in British government history. And the former Afghan judge Marzia Babakarkhail<strong> <\/strong>tells Helen about how Afghans fear the data list could could endanger their lives.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"People boarding a hangar plane at Kabul airport\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1762.jpg\" width=\"445\" height=\"356.1010215664018\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"dcr-evn1e9\"\/> Photograph: Ministry of Defence\/PA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week an email was sent to people in Afghanistan. It told the recipients, who had all worked&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-270907","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114871912646491248","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}