LONDON (AP) – The UK police secretary said on Monday that “human error” has resulted in hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other data on criminal suspects being erased from the national police computer.
Kit Malthouse told lawmakers in the House of Commons that the accident occurred during a “normal household trial” on the computer, which contains 13 million records. He said about 400,000 records were deleted, including 213,000 criminal offenses and 170,000 arrest records.
“It is clear that this situation is very serious,” said Malthouse, adding that “in the coming days we will know the full extent of the impact of this issue.”
Labor legislator Yvette Cooper said it was “very difficult to understand how to remove 400,000 records from such a critical system without a proper backup system in place.”
Malthouse said officials were trying to recover the data, but he could not guarantee that no criminal investigation would be harmed by the mistake. He said the government was working “to ensure that any operational impact is avoided or mitigated.”