LONDON - Heather Mills last night said a journalist at British publisher Trinity Mirror,owner of the Daily Mirror, had hacked her phone before she was married to former Beatle Paul McCartney.
The accusation widens a scandal over phone hacking by British newspapers that has largely centred on titles owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, with the furore also threatening to embroil US talk show host Piers Morgan.
The BBC said the messages were left by McCartney, whom Mills married in 2002. The couple separated four years later. Mills said the journalist had confronted her with details of sensitive messages left on her phone. "He started quoting verbatim the messages from my machine, and. . . I'd wondered why they had already been heard, listened to, when it says 'heard messages'," Mills told the BBC.
"I said you've obviously hacked my phone and if you do anything with this story, because they were obviously very private conversations about issues we were having as a couple, I said then I'll go to the police," she added.
She went on to say the journalist admitted hacking her phone and agreed not to use a story based on the messages.
CNN talk show host Morgan, who once edited the News of the Worldand later the Daily Mirror, has repeatedly denied any role in the phone hacking scandal. However, in a 2006 article for the Mail,Morgan said he had listened to one of Mills's phone messages. "Stories soon emerged that the marriage was in trouble - at one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone," he wrote.
The BBC said Morgan was not the journalist who had contacted Mills with details of her phone messages.
Morgan said in a statement that "Heather Mills has made unsubstantiated claims about a conversation she may or may not have had with a senior executive from a Trinity Mirrornewspaper in 2001". He described her claims as "somewhat extravagant".
"To reiterate, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone," he added. - (Reuters)