Outcry in UK over accidental deletion of crucial police data
UK Home Secretary Priri Patel has come under fire after accidental deletion of thousands of data crucial to police work.
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In the UK, Home Secretary Priti Patel has come under fire again after her services accidentally deleted hundreds of thousands of criminal information crucial to police.
A technical error that could have serious consequences and allow certain suspects to escape justice even though the country has already lost its access to the vast European database since Brexit.
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With our correspondent in London,
Muriel Delcroix
Fingerprints, DNA, criminal records ... A total of 150,000 documents were mistakenly deleted from a vital database for British police across the country.
The police have access to it to help them solve their investigations or check in real time the criminal records of suspicious persons.
According to the daily
The Times
which revealed the case this Friday, January 15, the consequences are potentially catastrophic.
A police source has warned that deleting this data could compromise future investigations and allow many criminals to slip through the cracks.
In a statement, the Interior Ministry assures us that the erased data concerned only suspects released without having been prosecuted.
Nevertheless, the Labor opposition is worried about the "
serious dangers
" posed by this error and denounces "
the incompetence of the government
".
Labor also calls on
Interior Minister Priti Patel
to explain herself publicly.
The blunder is all the more embarrassing as Boris Johnson's government insisted that after leaving the EU, London would have enough criminal information, despite losing its access to the European Arrest Warrant. .
However, 40,000 alerts concerning European criminals have already disappeared from British police files since
the signing of the post-Brexit agreement
.
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