Most Airlift Afghans on Secret Scheme List Were Bogus Asylum Seekers: Report

Only a small fraction of the Afghans on the leaked Ministry of Defence document had any grounds to be bought to Britain, a report citing ministry sources claims.

As few as one-in-15 people on the vetting list that was emailed to Afghanistan and which then allegedly found its way into the hands of the Taliban — presenting them with a so-called “kill list” of Afghan collaborators and individuals who had applied to relocate to Britain, as well as British soldiers and spies — actually had grounds to request emigration.

Broadsheet The Daily Telegraph reports the up-to 100,000 people on the list, which includes families as well as the principal applicants, were mostly not Afghan citizens who had worked as interpreters for UK forces. Many were Afghans who had applied and who may have been “playing the system” by applying to multiple Western nations to come to Britain even if they had no realistic hope of being accepted.

The paper cites “MOD sources” who state that had the list not been leaked and a secret plan to airlift thousands of Afghans to Britain, as few as one-in15 would actually have been accepted. The paper stated they were told by an insider, who is reported to have worked on the secret airlift programme, that: “most of those on the leaked list had already been rejected for resettlement to the UK.”

The numbers involved are considerable. As summarised by The Spectator, through all the Afghan resettlement schemes including the secret Afghanistan Response Route some 35,245 Afghans have arrived in Britain and a further 5,400-or-so have been given their letters and are due to fly into the country in the coming weeks.

A further 27,285 Afghans have arrived in the United Kingdom illegally as boat migrants since 2018, they stated. In all, that is 67,930 additional Afghans in the United Kingdom in recent years, many of whom — as stated by The Telegraph — had no right to be here.

And the number may yet continue to rise, given now the news of the government’s data leak getting into the wild has given the human rights and immigration lawyers a scent of blood. Further reports state arguments are already being prepared that by leaking the list, even those Afghans who had no grounds to come to Britain may be able to argue the British government has trespassed on their European Court of Human Rights-granted right to life, given the claimed risk from the Taliban.

On these grounds, law firms may argue that those on the lists are due cash compensation, or even have to be flown to Britain as well, with the full list of claimants plus extended family standing at some 100,000 people.

Even as the scandal broke this week, The Times reports the government still defaulted to an instinctive secrecy, applying for more injunctions to hide specifics even as the initial superinjunction was discharged. Among the fresh details emerging now, after one of those further injunctions was suspended in court on Thursday, is that beyond the Afghan applicants on the leaked list were Britons too, including civil servants, soldiers, and spies who had worked on the scheme.

Paradoxically, even after some of these details were revealed in Parliament, British journalists were still legally blocked from reporting them.

Former defence minister Grant Shapps, who took up his post last year as the government discovered the email list had been leaked unnoticed a year before, spoke out on Friday morning for the first time to say he had no regrets about getting the superinjunction that banned the news from being reported, and gagged publications from even revealing they’d been silenced. Saying he would do the same again, he assigned a moral equivalence to the secret airlift Afghans to Britain’s “nuclear codes”, explaining there are some things a government simply must keep secret.