Coulson and other hackers facing up to two years’ jail
ANDY Coulson and five others are facing prison for their roles in what prosecutors called a ‘pervasive’ culture of phone hacking at the News of the World.
Under Mr Coulson’s editorship, the phone messages of actors, celebrities, and politicians were intercepted on ‘an industrial scale’. Police identified 4,000 possible victims.
The hacking scandal began to unravel in 2007, when royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for intercepting the voicemails of members of the royal Household.
initially News international insisted the practice was limited to one ‘rogue reporter’. But that defence crumbled after emails disclosed in a series of civil actions for damages exposed a wider conspiracy.
By last October – at the start of this trial – the scale of the hacking plot became clear when the Old Bailey was told that three former news editors at the newspaper were among five men who pleaded guilty to their part in the hacking plot.
Senior executives Greg Miskiw, 64, James Weatherup, 58, and Neville Thurlbeck, 52, all admitted playing a part in a six-year campaign of phone hacking which targeted politicians, pop stars and members of the royal Family. Mulcaire, 43, who was paid £100,000 a year by the paper to arrange the hacking, admitted intercepting the voicemails of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, among a host of other victims.
At an earlier hearing, he also admitted three counts of conspiracy to commit phone hacking after police found ‘thousands and thousands of pages’ of notes relating to his victims. And reporter Dan Evans, who appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the hacking trial, confessed to hacking Sienna Miller’s messages on actor Daniel Craig’s phone.
He has admitted conspiracy to hack phones at the Sunday Mirror between February 2003 and January 2005, and the same offence at the News of the World between April 2004 and June 2010.
He also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office and perverting the course of justice.
They will be sentenced alongside Coulson after he was f ound guilty yesterday of conspiring to hack phones. They each face a maximum sentence of two years for the phone hacking. The former News of the World Editor, whose affair with Mrs Brooks was sensationally revealed during the trial when excerpts from a deeply per- sonal letter from his co-defendant were read to the jury, will face sentencing shortly after the trial finally ends. At that point, it is likely that Miskiw, Weatherup, Thurlbeck and Mulcaire will be brought back to court to be told their fate.
The jury heard that phone hacking was so widespread at the News of the World that senior journalists even used a special hotline for ‘doit-yourself hacking’ and targeted rival journalists.
CELEBRITIES who were hacked include Sir Paul McCartney and his then wife Heather Mills, as well as Jude law and Miller, his girlfriend at the time. Kate Moss, Will Young and Joanna lumley were targeted too. Mulcaire admitted recording voicemail messages belonging to former Home Secretary David Blunkett and British nanny louise Woodward, who was convicted of killing a child in the US in the 1990s.
News UK – the British newspaper publishing arm of rupert Murdoch’s media empire – said it had put in place measures to ensure that the wrongdoing at the News of the World could not happen again.
‘We said long ago, and repeat today, that wrongdoing occurred, and we apologised for it.
‘We have been paying compensation to those affected and have cooperated with investigations,’ the company said. ‘We made changes in the way we do business to help ensure wrongdoing like this does not occur again.’
Brian Cathcart from lobby group Hacked Off, which campaigns for state-imposed regulation of the Press, said: ‘For years the Murdoch press clung to the story that one rogue reporter was responsible for phone hacking. We now know this was a lie.
‘Far from being an isolated incident involving a few “bad apples”, the trial has shown that the entire orchard was rotten.’