MP Tom Tugendhat has said the Taliban are running "a slick PR operation masking a vicious death cult", as he tore down claims from a group spokesman that Britons stuck in Afghanistan will be allowed to leave safely.

The Tonbridge and Malling MP, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, appeared on Good Morning Britain today, after a Taliban spokesman claimed that people "with proper documents" will be able to get out once civilian flights begin again.

As well as this, Suhail Shaheen insisted that women's rights are being respected and that al-Qaeda will not be tolerated.

This comes despite many reports of persecutions by the Taliban, since they took control of the country, toppling the government.

Mr Tugendhat, a former Army Lieutenant Colonel who served in Helmand, said: "I'm afraid your viewers have just been lied to, it's absolutely clear that groups who make up the Taliban... have been rounding up people in Lashkar Gah and Kandahar and hunting them down in Kabul and killing them.

"Universities are being closed... women are being denied access to education, girls are being denied access to education, and civil servants, female civil servants, are being sent home."

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the number of British national still in the country is "now down at a very low level" after 5,000 were brought home since April this year, adding it was in the low hundreds.

But it's not clear how many Afghan citizens who worked for the British Government are stranded after the withdrawal of Western forces was completed.

Speaking from a base in Doha, Shaheen sought to reassure Good Morning Britain viewers on the Taliban's approach.

He said: "Every Afghan citizen who is intending to go abroad to another country and has proper documents like passports, visas - they can go. And they can also come to Afghanistan," he said.

"But we urge them to stay in Afghanistan. As we have gained our independence, it is time for all Afghans to build their country. their capacities, their talents are direly needed."

Later in the day, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told MPs that he does not know precisely how many UK nationals have been forced to remain in Afghanistan.

Mr Raab also said that intelligence reports had wrongly suggested that Kabul would not fall to the Taliban this year.

The Foreign Secretary appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee earlier to answer questions about the operation to ensure the safety of those who had fled the country.

MP Tom Tugendhat, pressed Mr Raab on the number of UK citizens and potential refugees left behind and why intelligence reports were inaccurate.

Mr Raab told the cross-party committee: “The central assessment that we were operating to, and it was certainly backed up by the JIC (joint intelligence committee) and the military, is that the most likely, the central proposition, was that given the troop withdrawal by the end of August, you’d see a steady deterioration from that point and it was unlikely Kabul would fall this year.”

Raab admitted when asked that he had no record of when ministers had last visited either Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, both Afghanistan’s neighbours.

But he sidestepped questions from Labour members of the committee about the fact that he was on holiday during a critical period in the run-up to the evacuation deadline.

He said that with hindsight he would not have gone away but accused Labour of a fishing expedition and dismissed as nonsense the idea that he was "lounging on a sunbed."

But he was forced to admit that he could not say with any precision exactly how many refugees and UK nationals were still in the country.

Mr Raab was "not confident with precision to be able to give you a set number" of those who were eligible to come to the UK, but had not been evacuated.

The committee took the unusual step of arranging a meeting during Parliament recess because of the serious nature of the crisis.

Head to our politics page for expert analysis and all the latest news from your politicians and councils.

Read more: All the latest news from Tonbridge

Read more: All the latest news from Malling