Taliban deny arresting or monitoring Afghans after UK data leak
The Taliban government said on Thursday it had not arrested or monitored Afghans involved in a secret British resettlement plan after a data breach was revealed this week.
Thousands of Afghans who worked with the United Kingdom were brought to Britain with their families in a secret programme after a 2022 data breach put their lives at risk, the UK government revealed on Tuesday.
The scheme was only revealed after the UK High Court lifted a super-gag order banning any reports of the events.
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.
“Nobody has been arrested for their past actions, nobody has been killed and nobody is being monitored for that,” the Afghan government’s deputy spokesman, Hamdullah Fitrat, told reporters on Thursday. “Reports of investigation and monitoring of a few people whose data has been leaked are false.”
After the Taliban swept back to power in 2021, their Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada announced an amnesty for Afghans who worked for Nato forces or the ousted foreign-backed government during the two-decade conflict.
“All their information and documents are present here in the defence ministry, the interior ministry and the intelligence [agency] ,” Fitrat added. “We don’t need to use the leaked documents from Britain.”
He said “rumours” were being spread to create fear among Afghans and their families.
Around 900 Afghans and 3,600 family members have now been brought to Britain or are in transit under the programme known as the Afghan Response Route, at a cost of around £400 million ($535m), Healey said.
They are among some 36,000 Afghans who Britain has accepted under different schemes since the August 2021 fall of Kabul.
Tens of thousands of Afghans fled Afghanistan in a chaotic weeks-long evacuation when the Taliban won their insurgency, after the mass withdrawal of international troops and air support to the country.
Tens of thousands more have been resettled under European and US asylum schemes, which, after four years, have now slowed to almost a halt.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in 2023 that there were credible reports of serious human rights violations by the Taliban authorities against hundreds of former government officials and former armed forces members.
From the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on 15 August 2021 to 30 June 2023, UNAMA documented at least 800 instances of extrajudicial killing, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and ill-treatment and enforced disappearance, it said in a report.
The Taliban’s Foreign Affairs Ministry denied the allegations and said all former employees had been pardoned.
The Taliban government has imposed a severe interpretation of Islamic law, which has seen women and girls banned from most education and jobs.