SCOTLAND YARD will come under fresh pressure today to reopen its inquiry into phone-hacking and the News of the World after prosecutors said they were never handed a document that appeared to implicate another of the newspaper’s senior staff.
The crown prosecution service (CPS) told the Guardian that detectives did not give them a key e-mail naming the tabloid’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.
In the e-mail, a junior News of the World reporter has copied a transcript of more than 30 messages hacked from the phones of the Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive, Gordon Taylor, and his legal adviser, Jo Armstrong. The e-mail recorded that the transcript had been prepared “for Neville”.
The News of the World has consistently claimed that the hacking of voicemail by a private investigator involved only one rogue journalist, their royal reporter, Clive Goodman, acting alone.
The CPS confirmed that the e-mail was not “physically” provided to them as evidence to support the prosecution of Goodman and the private investigator, Glen Mulcaire. Instead, it formed part of a bundle of documentary evidence that was retained by the police.
Prosecuting counsel would have seen it, but as it had no specific relevance to the case, the wider significance of it would not have been obvious.
Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), last week carried out an internal review of the 2007 files and decided not to reopen them, saying the Goodman-Mulcaire case had been properly dealt with at the time based on the evidence provided to them by the police.
In a new statement, the CPS said: “The e-mail was not in the possession of the CPS and so did not form part of the examination that the DPP carried out earlier this week.”
The statement added: “The DPP is now considering whether any further action is necessary.”
This development follows previous disclosures that police never interviewed Thurlbeck or other journalists named, according to the paper; that they failed to warn everyone who might have been hacked; that they did not investigate the possibility that the tabloid’s private eye succeeded in hacking the phones of many other targeted public figures, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott. – (Guardian service)