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The entire membership list of the British National party has been posted on the internet, identifying thousands of people as secret supporters of the far right and exposing many to the risk of dismissal from work, disciplinary action or vilification.

The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, claimed today that he knew the identity of the person who published the list, describing him as a "hardliner" senior employee who left the party last year.

"He didn't like the direction the party was going and broke away, taking the list with him," Griffin told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Around 13,500 names and home addresses were posted on a website on Monday evening.

As well as names and addresses, the list includes the home and mobile phone numbers and personal email addresses of BNP members. It is thought the list may include lapsed members of the party and the names and addresses of people who have expressed an interest in joining the party, but have not signed up. Many of the members' occupations are listed, revealing a small number of police, two solicitors, four ministers of religion, at least one doctor and a number of primary and secondary school teachers.

The list was removed from an internet blog today after complaints by the far right group.

A BNP spokesman, Simon Darby, said: "If we find out the name of the person who published this list it will turn out to be one of the most foolish things they have done in their life." Griffin insisted this did not represent a threat of violence but the reality that the person faced prison for breaching a high court injunction. The BNP leader admitted the party was relying on the Human Rights Act, based on EU legislation, which it opposes, to try to protect the privacy of its members.

He said he had no problem with publication of members' occupations but listing their names and addresses represented "a nasty piece of intimidation on behalf of the Labour regime".

However, Griffin welcomed the publicity the story had garnered for the party, saying the list showed the perception of the average BNP member as a "skinhead oik" was "simply not true".

Last night, Darby said the police had been called in to investigate the data security breach. Describing the posting as "malevolent and spiteful", he said: "This isn't a question of us mislaying the information, this is theft."

The BNP list includes the names and ages of children who have become members of the party after a parent has taken out a family membership, and several people who have joined the party at the age of 16.

Against the name of a woman said to be a serving police officer and living on the Wirral, Merseyside, is the note: "Discretion required re employment concerns - police officer", along with the names and ages of a number of her children.

Other notes against the names of individuals include: "Discretion requested (employment concerns), government employee, IT consultant" and "activist (discretion requested), teacher (secondary school)".

The BNP is known to go to considerable lengths to conceal the identities of members. Membership lists are held on computer spreadsheets, usually by an official based in York. He sends limited lists to local organisers as encrypted attachments to emails that can be accessed only by officials who have been given a password.

The BNP conceded that very few people would have had access to its full membership list. The party said the list was not up to date, featuring no members who had signed up since late 2007, and included the names of people who had never been members of the party. The party said it had obtained an injunction this year at the high court in Manchester to prevent the misuse of its membership list.

Griffin confirmed on the party's website that much of the list was genuine, and that it contained data stored at some point between November 30 and December 2 2007. "This latest attack is not really directed against our own people, who are already tough-minded and know that nothing ever comes of this sort of bluster, so much as against the thousands of [members of the UK Independence party] who are thinking of joining us.

"It probably will frighten some of them, but it's water off a duck's back to the stout hearts of the British National party."

Last night, internet chat rooms frequented by British supporters of the far right were buzzing with anger, indignation and considerable alarm. One typical posting said: "The most shocking thing is some of the comments by the names! God help anyone who is in the army, the prison service, health care, a police officer or a teacher."

It is thought the information commissioner, who enforces the Data Protection Act, may investigate the matter, looking not only at the posting of the list but at the amount of information the BNP has been storing about its members.

A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner's Office said: "Following media reports that the personal details of BNP members have been incorrectly disclosed, we will be contacting the party to establish the full facts. We will then decide what action, if any, is appropriate.

"We encourage all organisations to alert the Information Commissioner's Office if they discover a security breach has occurred."

The membership list reveals that the BNP has a handful of members in Australia, one in Oman and around 17 living in the United States. Some of the members' hobbies are listed. One gives her occupation as "holistic therapist" and her pastimes as "metaphysics, cartoon drawing". Another lists his hobbies as "fantail doves, koi carp, gardening".

There are one or two insights into reasons that people have left the party. Against the name of one lapsed member from Gillingham, Kent, is the note: "Objects to being told he shouldn't wear a bomber jacket."

? Additional reporting Duncan Campbell and Paul Lewis

An Indian warship has fought off an attack by a suspected pirate ship in the Gulf of Aden, the Indian navy said today.

The attack last night was on the same day pirates hijacked a Thai boat and an Iranian bulk cargo carrier off Somalia's coast.

The INS Tabar, which is dedicated to fighting pirates, approached the suspect vessel and asked it to stop to be searched.

The Indian navy said the pirate ship appeared to be a "mother vessel" loaded with food, diesel and water, and had two speedboats in tow. Naval officers could see men roaming the ship's deck with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and guns.

The pirates opened fire, threatening to blow up the warship, but the INS Tabar retaliated, sparking explosions and a fire that destroyed the pirate vessel.

This is the third attack the INS Tabar has warded off since it began its anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden at the start of the month.

Spokesmen for the International Maritime Bureau's piracy centre in Malaysia and the 5th Fleet in Bahrain said they had received no reports involving an Indian ship.

The Somalian prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, said naval patrols would not stop piracy and appealed for more help to tackle criminal networks with links beyond his Horn of Africa nation.

"We are very sorry this piracy problem is not limited only to Somalia but is affecting the whole region, is affecting the world," he told Reuters. "The warship operations alone will not be sufficient. Since there is a piracy network, it means an operational network which includes the sea, the land and also outside the country sometimes."

Somali pirates are being helped by Yemenis, and possibly Nigerians, analysts suspect.

Foreign leaders are gathering in Brussels today for a two-day Nato meeting, which is expected to address the piracy problem.

Pirate attacks off the Somali coast have surged 75% this year as bandits seeking million-dollar ransoms have pushed further out to sea in search of bigger prey among the 20,000 oil tankers, freighters and merchant vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden each year.

At least a dozen vessels and more than 250 international crew are being held hostage. Pirates have reaped £20m in ransom payments this year.

The latest attacks threaten one of the world's busiest shipping routes, which could push up the cost of goods and commodities around the world.

Yesterday, Somalis seized a Hong Kong-registered cargo ship carrying 36,000 tonnes of wheat to Iran.

The Delight, with 25 crew on board, was captured off Yemen in the seventh successful hijacking in the past 12 days. The US navy, whose patrols along Somalia's coast appear to be having little effect on the pirates, said the ship belonged to Iran's state shipping line.

A British tanker came under attack yesterday but the pirates were thwarted when the German frigate Karlsruhe launched a helicopter to intercept them. Pirates did manage to seize a Greek bulk carrier.

The attacks came a day after it was revealed that Somali pirates had hijacked a Saudi supertanker carrying $100m (£67m) of oil. The US-bound Sirius Star was taken 450 miles south-east of the Kenyan port of Mombasa. It is the largest vessel yet captured by pirates.

The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, described the hijacking of the Sirius Star, which is carrying 2m barrels of oil, as an "outrageous act" and promised to support a European-led initiative to increase security off Africa's east coast.

"Piracy, like terrorism, is a disease which is against everybody, and everybody must address it together," he said.

The Somalian government - facing an Islamist insurgency and crippled by infighting - appears powerless to stop the pirate groups, which are said to be employing up to 3,000 gunmen.

Four square metres of rainforest are destroyed for every gram of cocaine snorted in the UK, a conference of senior police officers as told yesterday.

Francisco Santos Calderón, the vice-president of Colombia, appealed to British users of the class A drug to consider the impact on the environment. He said that while the green agenda would not persuade addicts to give up, the middle-class social user who drove a hybrid car and was concerned about the environment might not take the drug if they knew its impact.

Santos said 300,000 hectares of rainforest were destroyed each year in Colombia to clear land for coca plant cultivation, predominantly controlled by illegal groups, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as Farc.

Officers were told cocaine and heroin use cost the British economy around £15bn a year in health and crime bills.

Santos outlined to the Association of Chief Police Officers how lives were lost in the illegal cocaine trade in Colombia. He said landmines that were used to protect crops and processing labs killed almost 900 civilians this year.

Farc and other groups funded by narcotics production were also involved in kidnapping. The Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt was held for more than six years before her release earlier this year, and Santos himself was kidnapped and held by a cocaine gang for 18 months in the 1990s.

He told the Belfast conference: "If you snort a gram of cocaine, you are destroying 4m square of rainforest and that rainforest is not just Colombian - it belongs to all of us who live on this plant, so we should all be worried about it. Not only that, the money that you use to buy the cocaine goes into the hands of Farc, of illegal groups that plant mines, that kidnap, that kill, that use terrorism to protect their business."

Santos said many middle-class Britons who used cocaine were unaware of its environmental impact. "For somebody who drives a hybrid, who recycles, who is worried about global warming - to tell him that that night of partying will destroy 4m square of rainforest might lead him to make another decision."

Santos said Europe was experiencing a boom in cocaine use among more affluent people that was comparable with that seen in the USA 25 years ago. Everyone, he said, had a duty to change their behaviour to halt a rise in demand that was destroying his country. "We call it shared responsibility, We can't do it on our own. We need everybody's action; police here, police in Colombia, the authorities in both countries and the consumers too. If there is no consumption, there will be no production.

"There is a sense of frustration, because here drug use is seen as a personal choice and to some extent cocaine is seen as the champagne of drugs which causes no effect and is a victimless crime. It is not victimless."

Bill Hughes, the director general of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, told the conference that the UK was a very attractive market for drug traffickers. "There is still a lot of disposable income; the risk compared to the US if you are caught is felt to be much less," he said.

The £15bn cost to the economy reduced the amount of money available for schools, teachers and police officers. He said traffickers moved their drugs from South America to west Africa, and then to the EU and Britain, often operating through insecure countries with poor law enforcement. Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands were major staging posts on the trafficking routes and much of the synthetic drug market was supplied from the Netherlands. Hughes said the proceeds of crime were undermining or corrupting governments globally, with the trade worth £4bn-£6.6bn in the UK.

Britain's coke habit

? The UK has the highest number of cocaine users in the EU, according to the latest figures

? Acpo was told that 14% of the UK's population had used cocaine. After increases in the last few years, numbers who took the drug were now stabilising

? The drugs come to Britain from South America via west Africa. Drugs are often trafficked through insecure countries with poor law enforcement

? Figures from the British Crime Survey this month suggested about 810,000 Britons had taken cocaine in the last year

? Some 3% of people questioned admitted using class A drugs over the past 12 months, which was less than in the previous year