Britain's defence ministry has launched an urgent investigation 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 match in the city on 16 March.
The army papers - some marked "OFFICIAL - SENSITIVE" - were spilling from a black bin bag and "spread all the way up the road", Mr Gibbard told BBC Radio Newcastle.
"I peered down and started to see names on bits of paper and numbers, and thought 'what's that?'" he said.
The BBC said the papers - many of them torn - 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.
The broadcaster said that several documents appeared to relate to Catterick - the UK's largest army garrison.
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."
Northumbria Police said that officers had been alerted to the find and passed on the papers to the defence ministry.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that "appropriate action will be taken in response to any potential information breach".
UK government guidelines state that sensitive documents should be incinerated, pulped or shredded, but confidential papers have ended up in several unusual places in the past.
One of the most high-profile cases took place in 2008, when a British civil servant left a folder of intelligence documents marked "Top Secret" on a train in London.
