A 50-year-old man has been charged with possessing documents or records likely to be useful to terrorists following a major police data breach 11 days ago.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) mistakenly released details on 10,000 of its employees in response to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.
The man was also charged with having articles for use in terrorism and is due in court in Coleraine on Monday.
The FoI details were published online after being released by the PSNI.
They were taken down from a website at the PSNI’s direction a short time later.
Police have confirmed the list is in the hands of dissident republicans, amongst others.
Other data breach incidents
It was one of three separate PSNI data breach incidents being examined by police.
On 6 July, in an unrelated incident, a police-issue laptop and radio, as well as a document containing the names of more than 200 staff, were stolen from a private vehicle in Newtownabbey, County Antrim.
In another incident, on Thursday 17 August, a PSNI laptop and a police officer’s notebook fell from the roof of a moving car on the M2 in Belfast.
The incident happened on the M2 motorway on Thursday
It happened on the Foreshore stretch of the motorway in the north of the city.
The PSNI confirmed that this notebook contained details of 42 officers and staff and sections of the book still have not been found.
They said the laptop that fell off the vehicle on the M2 was recovered and “immediately deactivated”.
On Friday, a police spokesperson said the PSNI would be contacting the Information Commissioner about the M2 incident.
They added that Stormont’s Department of Justice and the Northern Ireland Policing Board, which holds the PSNI to account, had already been informed about the breach.
