Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

Scotland Yard's finest still dodging the issues, seeking to bury the copious evidence already in their possession, and intimidating potential whistle-blowers by proposing to interview them under criminal caution.

Murdoch and his hacks still protected.

Police ask Guardian for phone-hacking evidence

Paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, points out that police already have access to material on practices at the News of the World

October 13, 2010

The Metropolitan police have written to the Guardian asking for any new material the paper holds about phone hacking at the News of the World.

The request follows a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary last week that contained further evidence that the practice was widespread at the tabloid paper.

The programme featured an anonymous ex-News of the World journalist who said the then editor Andy Coulson listened to recordings of voicemails that had been illegally obtained.

Coulson, who is now David Cameron's director of communications, has always insisted he did not know about the practice.

Detective Superintendent Dean Haydon, who is leading the Met's review of the phone-hacking case, has written to the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, asking for any new material that may have come to light.

In his reply, Rusbridger points out that police already have access to evidence that would help with their inquiry, including transcripts of voicemail messages that were intercepted by News of the World employees from a mobile phone belonging to the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor.

"[The Guardian journalist] Nick Davies was able to reveal incontrovertible evidence of the involvement in phone hacking of other NoW reporters and executives: the material is sitting in your own files, and was obtained by lawyers acting for Gordon Taylor," Rusbridger wrote.

The Guardian revealed in July last year that the News of the World had paid £1m in out-of-court settlements to three people, including Taylor, after messages left on their mobile phones were intercepted by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator on the News of the World payroll.

Mulcaire and the paper's former royal editor Clive Goodman were jailed for listening to phone messages belonging to members of the royal household in January 2007.

Rusbridger said that Davies had been able to publish fresh revelations about the extent of the practice over the past year by "taking the trouble to interview a large number of people who were working at the News of the World at the relevant time". He suggested the police do the same.

"That, it seems to us, would be a more productive route than seeking to interview other journalists who have looked into the story," he said.

"It has been open to the MPS to [interview News of the World journalists] since your colleagues arrested Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman in 2006," Rusbridger pointed out. "But the MPS decided at the time that they would interview no other NoW journalists than Mr Goodman himself."

Rusbridger also criticised the Met for interviewing under caution ex-News of the World journalists who have come forward this year to talk about phone hacking at the paper.

"Many external observers are troubled that the MPS is adopting the intimidatory approach of seeking to interview these whistleblowers under caution – ie treating them as potential defendants as opposed to potential witnesses," he said.

Since the Guardian published its initial revelations last year, a huge amount of new evidence has come to light about the number of journalists who were involved in the practice, and dozens of public figures have spoken out about being targeted by the paper.

Its publisher, News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, is facing a raft of expensive legal cases.

There have also been several parliamentary inquiries into how much News International executives knew about the practice. One former journalist, Sean Hoare, has said Coulson "actively encouraged" phone hacking and an executive, Paul McMullan, claimed that the former editor must have been aware of it.

The New York Times ran a lengthy exposé into phone hacking at the News of the World in July. A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on the issue was broadcast last week.

"The fact that three separate news organisations have been able to uncover this story must give you hope that you, too, could got to the bottom of it without too much trouble," Rusbridger told Haydon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct...ne-hacking

Text of Guardian editor Rusbridger's letter to Det Supt Haydon as pdf:

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Me...nreply.pdf