Taliban soldiers may be walking the streets of Britain after being granted asylum after the evacuation of Kabul, a former Defence Secretary has hinted.
Sir Ben Wallace opened the door to the idea as part of the inquiry into the Afghan data leak scandal as he gave evidence to MPs.
A single mistaken email by a Royal Marine exposed the personal details of 25,000 Afghans and their families who helped Britain fight the Taliban - a blunder now labelled “the most expensive email in history".
The data breach resulted in the Government having to fork out over £7billion over five years to relocate the Afghans involved to the UK.
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Sir Ben told the Defence Select Committee he could not rule out the possibility of Taliban fighters slipping through the cracks after British forces evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021 - which the MoD was forced to deny.
Tory MP Lincoln Jopp asked the ex-Defence Secretary: “Do you think that we probably did let some Taliban in?”
He replied: “I’m sure in a large-scale evacuation we didn’t get everything right, but ultimately we tried to vet and did as much as we could and that’s where we got the leak.
“What I can’t talk about is the ARR [Afghanistan Response Route], when the ARAP [Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy] morphed after I’d left, and what they did under the pressure of that leak and whether people dropped the bar.”
Sir Ben said he could not rule out the possibility of Taliban fighters slipping through the cracks
|PA
After the Taliban seized control of the country following the withdrawal of US forces, Britain was flooded with applications for the ARAP scheme.
Sir Ben said he was "determined" to keep the scheme separate from Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), which offers asylum to women, children and other vulnerable groups, and allow the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to oversee ARAP.
He told the Committee: “The Home Office was always very keen to blur the two and I didn’t want to blur the two."
However, the ex-Tory minister said the MoD was forced to "design and make immigration databases from scratch”.
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The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US forces
|GETTY
“Maybe, in retrospect, I should have just handed it over and let the Home Office run its own immigration system," Sir Ben said.
"I think none of us in this room are ever impressed with the Home Office immigration system under any government, so I think it was rather better to just run it ourselves.”
The data breach saw almost 24,000 Afghan troops and their relatives handed asylum in secret under the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) programme.
The leak was hidden from the British public for almost two years due to a super-injunction.
The ex-Tory minister said the MoD was forced to 'design and make immigration databases from scratch'
| GETTYThe unprecedented move is believed to have cost the Government as much as £2.4million.
Sir Ben said he did not believe concealing news of the breach via a super-injunction was "necessary" or "the right thing to do".
But a spokesman for the MoD insisted that there is “no evidence to suggest any member of the Taliban had been relocated through the ARP”.
He added: “As the public would rightly expect, anyone coming to the UK must pass strict security and entry checks before being able to relocate.
"If they don’t pass these checks, they are not granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK.”
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