A senator sent inauthentic documents to stranded Afghans

In the final days of a chaotic government effort to rescue people from the Taliban last summer, Senator Marilou McPhedran and one of her staff members sent travel documents to a family attempting to flee Afghanistan. The documents, called facilitation letters, were supposed to help the Afghans bypass checkpoints that had been set up around Kabul’s airport, so they could catch one of the last evacuation flights out of the country. A year later, the people who received those documents are still stuck in Afghanistan. And the Canadian government has at last explained why: the facilitation letters they received from the senator and her office were not authentic, and the people named on them had not been approved to come to Canada.

The Globe’s Marieke Walsh explains what happened, how government officials are responding, and what this means for the people still stuck in Afghanistan.

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