By KUNA,
London : The British Cabinet Office has suspended the civil servant at the centre of an inquiry into the loss of top-secret documents on Al-Qaeda and Iraq, it was confirmed here Thursday.
The unnamed Cabinet Office employee was questioned in an internal inquiry after the sensitive papers were left on the seat of a commuter train.
A fellow passenger spotted the envelope containing the files and gave it to the BBC, who handed them to the police, the corporation said.
Britains Home Secretary Jacqui Smith now faces demands for an official inquiry.
MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the powerful UK Home Affairs Parliamentary Committee told the BBC “Such confidential documents should be locked away … they should not be read on trains.
“I will be writing to the Home Secretary to establish an inquiry into the affair,” he said.
The main opposition conservatives backed calls for an inquiry, with their security spokeswoman, Pauline Neville-Jones, describing the loss as the latest in a “long line of serious breaches of security.” The opposition Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne described the breach as “appalling”.
“It beggars belief that the government could have scored such a devastating own goal on the very day it was pushing draconian counter-terrorism laws through parliament,” he said.
For his part, British Home Office Minister Tony McNulty told the BBC he was awaiting the results of the police investigation.
The two reports were assessments made by the Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee.
One, on Iraq’s security forces, was commissioned by the UK Ministry of Defence.
According to the BBC, it included a top-secret and in some places “damning” assessment of Iraq’s security forces.
The other document, reportedly entitled “Al-Qaeda Vulnerabilities”, was commissioned jointly by the UK Foreign Office and the Home Office.
Reports suggest that the official, described as a senior male civil servant, works in the Cabinet Office’s intelligence and security unit, which contributes to the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
His work reportedly involves writing and contributing to intelligence and security assessments, and he has the authority to take secret documents out of the Cabinet Office, so long as strict procedures are observed.
Once the documents were reported missing, a full-scale search was launched by the London Metropolitan Police, amid fears that such highly sensitive material could have fallen into the wrong hands.
The BBC said that across several government departments last night there was said to be “horror” that top-secret documents could have been so casually mislaid. Any inquiry is likely to focus on the Cabinet Office, and the security procedures that made it possible for sensitive information to be allowed out of a secure environment, it added.