Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks.

We're beginning with news of a big data leak. This one wasn't a hack. It was a mistake. These things happen. They shouldn't, of course, but they do. The difference with this

one is the scale of the potential harm, that it could potentially have been lethal and that the

British government tried to suppress news of the leak from coming out. What happened was this.

In February 22, an official that the British Ministry of Defence sent out to thousands of people in Afghanistan the names of 19,000 Afghans who had applied for resettlement in the UK, fearful that their previous work alongside British forces might put them at risk, given that the Taliban were now in power. It was only

18 months later that the MOD, the Ministry of Defence, became aware of the leak. Officials

try to stem the damage in two ways. First, by setting up a new scheme costing, we're told

today more than a billion dollars, to get the people whose names had been leaked into the UK and to do so secretly.

And secondly, to issue a blanket injunction preventing anyone even reporting on the existence

of the list or the leak. That changed today when a high court judge in London ruled that the

gagging order should be lifted. Shortly thereafter, the British Defence Secretary John Healy addressed members of Parliament.

Mr Speaker, this serious data incident should never have happened.

It may have occurred three years ago under the previous government,

but to all those whose information was compromised,

I offer a sincere apology today on behalf of the British government.

Larissa Brown is the defence editor of the Times newspaper

and spearheaded the efforts to get the injunction lifted.

She told me how she had learned about the data breach.

I was on maternity leave, actually, at the time. This was August 2023, and I became aware of a

data breach, and I was told that thousands of Afghan lives have been put at risk as a result of that.

This was actually before a super injunction had been brought in, but then I later found out that there was a super injunction preventing us from revealing the details of the case and the fact that there was actually an order preventing us revealing those details.

And just interrupt, Larissa, that's what a super injunction is.

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