Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

In the immediate wake of Scotland Yard setting up Operation Tuleta - see post #280 above - Sky News, a Murdoch organ, has published an exclusive with former British military intelligence operative Ian Hurst, accusing the Metropolitan Police of "endemic corruption".

Hmmmm. Threat and counter-threat from long time shagees, the spooks and the Murdoch empire?

Mr Hurst says his investigations point not only to the NOTW but other newspapers and beyond the media.

"Beyond the media" - gotta love that phrase.

Who could former military intelligence officer Hurst possibly mean?

'Met Police Tried To Cover Up Hacking'

9:50am UK, Sunday July 31, 2011

David Bowden, senior correspondent

The former Army intelligence officer at the centre of the latest hacking inquiry has told Sky News police tried to sweep his case under the carpet and accuses the Metropolitan force of endemic corruption.

Ian Hurst's computer was allegedly hacked by the News Of The World (NOTW) searching for details of an IRA informer.

Scotland Yard is launching an investigation into information allegedly gathered illegally from him by a private investigator who, it is alleged, was working for the tabloid.

Mr Hurst, who spent 12 years gathering information for the Government, said: "The private investigator has admitted that he placed a computer trojan on my hard drive and obtained, over a three-month period, all the email traffic coming in and out.

"He could access social media and ostensibly surveiled me for a given period."

Mr Hurst believes the hackers were looking for information on an informer for the IRA, called Steak-knife.

He has reams of documents relating to his case, which goes back to 2006, but he believes the police were reluctant to investigate properly at the time.

He said if they had acted then on the information they had, it would have stopped others from becoming victims.

"It's incredibly important that we understand the rationale for the decisions to effectively sweep this under the carpet," he said.

Mr Hurst claims it is more than just bad policing that allowed the gathering of information to go on for so long.

He said: "Fundamentally, what lays behind this whole cesspit - not since 2006, it predates it by many years before that - we're dealing with institutionalised corruption.

"It's endemic within the Metropolitan Police and that has to be dealt with."

Mr Hurst says his investigations point not only to the NOTW but other newspapers and beyond the media.

"Some of the clients that the private detectives were working for are large financial institutions, celebrities, major PR organisations.

"It's diverse. The client is the source. They're the people willing to pay large sums of money to obtain this unlawful information and if you don't address the source you can put 10, 50 private detectives away but you won't remove the demand for the information."

Scotland Yard is now running three separate investigations: one into phone interceptions, one into computer crime and the third into police corruption.

Meanwhile, Labour has called on Prime Minister David Cameron and his most senior colleagues to "come clean" about their dealings with the Murdochs.

Senior party figures have sent out a series of letters to Cabinet ministers with more than 50 questions they say have not been addressed by the coalition in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.