Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

Former top rozzer Andy Hayman, who led one of the pathetic police investigations, faced even more direct questions from the parliamentary committee:

Andy Hayman, the officer in charge of the original investigation into phone hacking, told MPs that that operation now looks "very lame" but rejected suggestions that he was in the "back pocket" of News International as "unfounded".

Hayman, who served as assistant commissioner for specialist operations at the Metropolitan police during the first investigation in 2006, gave a combative performance in front of the committee as he faced accusations of coming across as "dogdy geezer".

Hayman, who became a columnist for the Times, owned by News International, two months after retiring from the Met police, also rejected claims made in the New York Times that he made a deal with NI because they held damaging information on his personal life.

Confronted with an article he wrote for the Times in 2009 in which he claimed he "left no stone unturned" in the original investigation, Hayman told MPs his detectives were "the best team that I ever had".

But Hayman said he had had "no involvement at all" in the decision not to trawl through the 11,000 documents.

He added: "At the time everything possible that they were able to do, given the resources and the parameters they set, was done and I stand by that and Peter [Clarke, the former deputy assistant commissioner] has as well.

"What we look like now, it's very lame … I think we've had more time to do it, more revelations have come out, the News of the World have given us material that we didn't have at the time."

Giving evidence earlier, Clarke said he had not trawled the 11,000 pages of material because he could not justify the resources that would have been needed.

The documents were seized by police after the arrest of the News of the World's then royal reporter Clive Goodman and Mulcaire, but Clarke and his senior colleagues decided against an "exhaustive analysis" of the documents, he told the committee.

"In the wider context of counter-terrorist operations that posed an immediate threat to the British public, when set against the criminal course of conduct that involved gross breaches of privacy but no apparent threat of physical harm to the public, I could not justify the huge expenditure of resources this would entail over an inevitably protracted period," he said.

Source.