Phone hacking scandal deepens

[David Guyatt]

Shock horror, toothpaste found in black bin sacks.

No one seems to be talking about what was one the laptops, tablets though?

Phone-hacking trial jury told of porn videos and computers in bags

Prosecutors tell phone-hacking trial Rebekah and Charlie Brooks plotted with security adviser Mark Hanna to conceal items

• Nick Davies
  
• The Guardian, Monday 20 January 2014 20.37 GMT
  

Mark Hanna at the phone-hacking trial at the Old Bailey Photograph: Mark Thomas/REX

Two bags that were allegedly hidden by Charlie Brooks to frustrate a police search contained two laptop computers, a tablet, an iPod, a mobile phone, a dictation machine and seven pornographic DVDs, an Old Bailey jury has heard.
Prosecutors have told the phone-hacking trial that Rebekah and Charlie Brooks plotted with their security adviser, Mark Hanna, to conceal items from police and then arranged for some "safe" material to be returned behind a rubbish bin in the car park of their London flat, where it was found by a cleaner and retrieved by detectives. All three deny conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
The jury was given a detailed inventory of the contents of two bags the crown say were found tied up in a black bin-liner in the car park on 18 July 2011, the day after police arrested Rebekah Brooks and searched her homes in London and Oxfordshire.
A brown briefcase contained electronic equipment including a Sony Vaio laptop and a mobile phone, and items ranging from a Wimbledon tennis programme to the newsletter of the British Kunekune Pig Society, toothpaste and a conker. There was also a magazine titled Lesbian Lovers and the seven pornographic DVDs with titles that included Instant Lesbian, Lesbian Psychodrama 2 and 3 and Where the Boys Are 17.
A black nylon bag with a World Economic Forum logo contained an Apple laptop, an iPad, and paperwork that included 19 unopened letters which had been addressed to the Brookses' country home, Jubilee Barn, and to the neighbouring Castle Barn, the home of Charlie Brooks's mother.
Neil Perkins, a porter from the block of flats, in Chelsea Harbour, told the jury that on the morning of 18 July he had come across a group of men searching around rubbish bins in the basement.
He said Charlie Brooks had become angry when he was told that two bags had been handed to police: "He said 'Oh, I'll sue them.'"
DC Alan Pritchard said on the following day he had supervised a specialist search team who had sifted through rubbish in a compactor in search of the bin liner in which the two bags had allegedly been concealed. This had been "not particularly pleasant", he said, and he had left it to the search team to complete the job.
When police specialists studied the bin liner that was retrieved, they found there were three liners that had been knotted and sealed with clear tape.
A fingerprint analyst, Kevin Young, said one carried the fingerprints of Daryl Jorsling, a security man, who, the jury have been told, was responsible for leaving the material behind the bins. The two others carried the fingerprints of Mark Hanna.
Earlier, one of Hanna's security staff, Robert Hernandez, told the jury that on Saturday 9 July, as the last edition of the News of the World was being produced, he had gone drinking with Hanna in the Dickens pub near the newspaper's office in Wapping. He said that after discussing Rebekah Brooks, Hanna told him that at some unspecified time he had dug a hole in his garden and "burned stuff" in it.
"I asked him if it was papers, and he did not reply. He just looked at me and didn't reply and just changed the conversation."
The jury also heard how in the week before Rebekah Brooks was arrested, she and other executives had been sent 'hate mail'. A sample which was read to the court was addressed to "the entire stinking crew of News International", called them "a bunch of self-serving hypocritical liars" adding that rotting in hell was too good a punishment for them. "Be certain that the universal law of karma will exact its revenge on each and every one of you. Have a nice day."
The trial continues.