The Times reports (£) that in the week when Liberal Democrat candidate Maajid Nawaz was subject to death threats after tweeting a cartoon of Mohammed, the Department of Communities and Local Government erroneously published his personal mobile number as part of a response to a Freedom of Information request:

It has now been revealed that in the week following the tweet — as Mr Nawaz received daily death threats and a bounty was declared on his head in Pakistan — the Department of Local Government and Communities (DCLG) posted his personal mobile number on their website.

The details were published as part of a reply to a Freedom of Information (FOI) Request and, according to a source, the DCLG “forgot” to redact confidential personal details of Mr Nawaz, who is the Lib Dem candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn in London, and other Quilliam staff.

And a Twitter user has had his account suspended for threatening to publish it:

The response that led to the publication of personal details concerned e-mails between Mr Nawaz and Mark Caroll, a senior DCLG official, sent in October last year in which the former requested funding for “vital” community work. The grant has since been denied.

The request is thought to have been made by an individual named Jason Schuman, who, under the Twitter handle @debatingculture, threatened to publicise the data that had been released by DCLG. His Twitter account has now been suspended.

A spokesman from the DCLG said: “In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, some limited information on the Quilliam Foundation was released that should have been redacted.

“This was corrected as soon as we were made aware, and we will improve guidance to staff to prevent it happening in the future.”