Tuesday, February 07, 2012
The police officer in charge of investigating illegal behaviour at News Corp’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid said her team had identified 829 "likely victims" of phone hacking.
About 90 officers and staff are working on the phone- hacking probe, known as Operation Weeting, Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers told an inquiry into media ethics in London.
She said she was expanding the number of personnel on an investigation into bribes to police, Operation Elveden, to 61, after it widened to include News Corp’s Sun newspaper.
Akers said investigators in the phone-hacking probe had uncovered 6,349 "potential victims" and then narrowed their focus to those they believed were targeted. More than 20 people have been arrested.
"We’ve defined ‘likely victims’ as those who have detail around their names, which suggests to us they’d either been hacked or had potential to be hacked."
She said a third probe into computer hacking, Operation Tuleta, has around 20 officers, investigating 57 claims of "data intrusion." That investigation has expanded to a third newspaper owned by News Corp, The Times, Labour MP Tom Watson said last week.
Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, told the inquiry there was a "prima facie case" that Steve Whittamore, a private investigator who worked for the Mail as well as other papers, "could have been acting illegally."
"I don’t accept that this is evidence that our journalists were actually behaving illegally," Dacre said. He explained how Whittamore, convicted of obtaining and disclosing information under the Data Protection Act in 2005, was used by journalists "rushing to get in touch with people."
"The journalist contacts Whittamore, he gets the phone numbers, and that’s how it happens," Dacre said. "Just a few phone numbers or an address or a name."
The Independent Police Complaints Commission said yesterday that it cleared an officer of selling information to journalists in 2002 about the investigation into the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The more than five-year-old scandal erupted in July after revelations that News of the World reporters accessed her phone while she was still missing.
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