BRITAIN’S DEFENCE MINISTRY has launched an urgent probe after a football fan found piles of sensitive military papers strewn across a street in northern England.

Newcastle United supporter Mike Gibbard said he stumbled across the documents on his way to a game in the city on Sunday, 16 March.

He said that the army papers – some marked “OFFICIAL – SENSITIVE” – were spilling from a black bin bag and “spread all the way up the road”.

“I peered down and started to see names on bits of paper and numbers, and thought ‘what’s that?’” Gibbard caid.

The BBC reports that the papers included details about soldiers’ ranks, emails, shift patterns, weapon issue records, and access information for military facilities.

One sheet was headed “armoury keys and hold IDS codes,” an apparent reference to an intruder detection system.

Consultant Gary Hibberd said the mishandling of such sensitive military information risked compromising Britain’s wider national security and poses a “significant” threat to individuals identified within.

“The impact and scale of this is quite big. It’s not just a blunder. This will be investigated within highest levels of the military,” Hibberd said.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “We are looking into this urgently and the matter is the subject of an ongoing internal investigation.”

They confirmed that “documentation allegedly relating to the department was recently handed in to the police”.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said “appropriate action will be taken in response to any potential information breach”.

The blunder comes days after a major confidentiality breach in the US saw its Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth post highly classified war plans targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen to a group chat on messaging app Signal which erroneously included a journalist from The Atlantic magazine.

Additional reporting from AFP.