Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

A couple of points worth highlighting from the information above:

We now know that members of the military, the government and the police also were victims.

This makes it prima facie a national security matter.

When they raided the offices of the News of the World, police limited their search warrant to the desk of Goodman. A journalist who was in the building at the time has given the Guardian the names of two senior staff members who that day removed black bin bags full of paperwork from their office desks.

So much for meticulously investigating a matter of vital national security.

Since then, senior officers from Scotland Yard have used press briefings to repeat the claim that there were "only a handful of victims".

A handful of victims, eh?

The Guardian claimed there were more, and Murdoch's News International vented its spleen.

News International accused the Guardian of "lying to the British people". The PCC held a second inquiry and again found no evidence of any wrongdoing. Within 24 hours, the Met's assistant commissioner, John Yates, said he had been asked by the commissioner to "establish the facts". Any independent inquiry will want to understand:

• Why Yates suggested that he had "established the facts around our inquiry" when, as he later conceded, Scotland Yard had not yet fully analysed the mass of material seized from Goodman and Mulcaire. Following his statement, Yates ordered officers to do so, and after several months of work they produced a spreadsheet listing more than 4,000 names or partial names, together with a summary of the material held on each one.

At least 4000 individuals targetted, eh?

Meanwhile, the original investigation was led by Asst Commissioner Andy Hayman, then counter-terrorism chief at the Metropolitan Police.

The former assistant commissioner who had headed the original inquiry, Andy Hayman, by now had left Scotland Yard and gone to work for the organisation that he had been investigating, News International.

As a regular columnist for the Times, he wrote about the Guardian's disclosures, claiming: "We put our best detectives on the case and left no stone unturned," and that, while there may have been hundreds of potential victims, "There was a small number – perhaps only a handful – where there was evidence they had actually been tampered with."

Hayman, who was criticized by the inquiry into the fatal shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes, was awarded a CBE in 2006, apparently for his handling of the investigation into the July 7 2005 London bombings.

Finally, and crucially, as editor of the News of the World, Coulson had to have knowledge of the nature of the evidence obtained by his journalists which was being used to run key, and potentially libellous, stories.

If he had no knowledge, then Coulson was - quite simply - failing to do his job.