The Latest Breaking News from Chamberlain

Ex-Tory defence secretary wanted data breach affecting those at risk from Taliban to be secret for as long as possible, say MoD sources

Fresh questions have been raised over why the unprecedented gagging order was maintained for so long when the level of risk to Afghans was known last year

Superinjunction preventing reporting of data breach was lifted this week more than 600 days after it had taken effect

The government data breach of about 18,900 Afghans who had worked for Britain and British interests, and the attempts to conceal much of the detail under a legal superinjunction, are bewildering, convoluted and shameful. In all, the lives of some 80,000 Afghans and their families may have been put at…

Conservative government used superinjuction to hide error that put Afghans at risk and led to £2bn mitigation scheme

A timeline of events in the data breach and how governments responded to it.

The decisions affect the lives and safety of thousands and the commitment of billions of pounds of public money.

Social affairs correspondent Holly Bancroft was one of a handful of journalists who knew about a catastrophic Ministry of Defence data leak – but an unprecedented legal order meant it could not be revealed. For two years, they battled to lift the draconian measures

For almost two years, an unprecedented order has kept a catastrophic government data breach secret

After a leak at the Ministry of Defence, officials faced a race to keep up to 100,000 Afghans from the Taliban’s clutches – with two years of court fights and rescue plans projected to cost billions, all hidden from MPs and the public. Now, after the lifting of an unprecedented…

More than 16,000 Afghans were secretly brought to the UK in the largest covert peacetime evacuation after the MoD put them in danger of being targeted by the Taliban. Social affairs correspondent Holly Bancroft reports