WASHINGTON—The British government reportedly asked the New York Times to destroy copies of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden related to the operations of the U.S. spy agency and its British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

According to people familiar with the matter, the British request, made to Times executive editor Jill Abramson by a senior diplomatic official, was greeted by Abramson with silence. British officials indicated they intended to follow up on their request later with the Times but never did, one of the sources said.

On Friday, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian in London said in a public statement that his newspaper, which had faced threats of possible legal action from British authorities, had destroyed copies of Snowden-leaked documents on July 20.

Rusbridger said that two days later, on July 22, the Guardian informed British authorities that materials related to GCHQ had made their way to the New York Times and the independent investigative journalism group ProPublica.

It then took British authorities “more than three weeks before anyone from the British government contacted the New York Times,” his statement said.

“We understand the British Embassy in Washington met with the New York Times in mid-August — over three weeks after the Guardian’s material was destroyed in London. To date, no one has contacted ProPublica, and there has been two weeks of further silence towards the New York Times from the government.

Rusbridger added that “this five-week period in which nothing has happened tells a different story from the alarmist claims made” by the British government in a witness statement it submitted Friday to a London court hearing regarding an official investigation into whether the handling of Snowden’s leaks violated the country’s anti-terrorism and official secrets laws.

A spokesman for the British Embassy told Reuters: “We are not going to get into the specifics about our efforts but it should come as no surprise if we approach a person who is in possession of some or all of this material.”

A spokeswoman for the New York Times said the paper had no comment.

The British investigation was opened after authorities at London’s Heathrow Airport used an anti-terrorism law earlier this month to detain David Miranda, the domestic partner of Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian writer who has met with Snowden and has played a lead role in writing about material the former NSA contractor leaked.

Miranda was held and questioned for nine hours before being allowed to resume his trip from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, where he and Greenwald live. Greenwald has said that Miranda was carrying Snowden-related material.

In her witness statement submitted Friday to the British court, Det. Supt. Caroline Goode, who said she was in charge of Scotland Yard’s Snowden-related investigation, said that among materials seized from Miranda while he was detained was an “external hard drive” containing data encrypted by a system called “True Crypt,” which Goode said “renders the material extremely difficult to access.”

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Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data, “of which only 20 have been accessed to date.”

She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains “approximately 58,000 U.K. documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level.”

Goode said the process to decode the material was complex and that “so far only 75 documents have been reconstructed since the property was initially received.”

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