Police say Sean Hoare, the whistleblower reporter who alleged widespread hacking at the News of the World, has been found dead.
Police said Hoare’s death at his home in England was not considered to be suspicious, according to Britain’s Press Association news agency.
Hoare was quoted by the New York Times as saying that phone-hacking was widely used and even encouraged at the News of the World tabloid under then-editor Andy Coulson.
Coulson — who most recently served as Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications chief, was arrested as part of the widening investigation into phone hacking and police corruption.
Second cop quits
Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer quit on Monday over his role in the phone-hacking scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, plunging London police into chaos a year before the city hosts the Olympic Games.
London’s Assistant Commissioner John Yates said he could not stay in his job amid “innuendo and speculation” about his conduct.
The decision came a day after Commissioner Paul Stephenson resigned and leaves the leadership of Britain’s oldest and largest police force of 32Â 000 officers in turmoil ahead of the London Olympics, the biggest security operation in its history.
“The threats that we face in the modern world are such that I would never forgive myself if I was unable to give total commitment to the task of protecting London and the country during this period,” Yates said in a televised statement.
“I simply cannot let this situation continue. I have acted with complete integrity and my conscience is clear.”
Yates had decided against re-opening a criminal investigation into alleged phone-hacking by journalists at the News of the World which led to the newspaper’s royal reporter and a private detective being jailed in 2007.
He dismissed demands for a new probe in 2009 after just eight hours of reconsidering the case. Asked at a parliamentary committee hearing last week whether he had done the minimum necessary, he said: “There’s probably an element of that.”
‘Crap’ decision
A new probe launched in January this year found police had 11Â 000 pages of evidence which had not been thoroughly examined by detectives and Yates agreed his decision was a “crap one”.
The Metropolitan Police Authority said it had suspended Yates over allegations made against him, but the officer decided to jump before he was pushed.
“This man [Yates] is right at the heart of all the problems with this,” former deputy prime minister John Prescott, who says he was a victim of phone-hacking, told BBC TV. “He should have gone before.”
Ordinary officers, already unhappy at government plans to reform their pay and conditions, were said to be very troubled by the attacks on the police by the media and politicians.
“I know John Yates, I’ve worked with him, I know him personally. If he goes I think it will be an absolute tragedy,” said Peter Smyth, chairperson of the Metropolitan Police Federation which represents lower-ranked and ordinary officers in London.
He said it was becoming a “witch-hunt”.
Detectives are investigating not only the hacking claims but also allegations that a small number of officers were taking payments from journalists in return for information.
Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor who ran Murdoch’s British newspaper arm News International until her resignation last week, was arrested on Sunday by officers investigating both the hacking and bribery claims.
She told a parliamentary committee in 2003 that journalists had “paid police for information in the past”.
At the centre of the scandal afflicting the Met is the suggestion that top officers and News International executives were too close.
Stephenson quit on Sunday over the Met’s decision to hire Neil Wallis, a former deputy editor at the News of the World at the time of the alleged hacking, as a PR adviser. Wallis was one of those to be arrested by the new inquiry team.
Stephenson had admitted accepting free treatment from a luxury health spa where Wallis also worked, although he denied any wrongdoing.
Andy Hayman, the senior officer who headed up investigations into the 2005 London bombings and oversaw the original hacking probe, admitted he had dined with News International executives while the original police probe in 2006 was ongoing.
Mistakes were made
After leaving the police, he went to work for the Times newspaper, part of the News International stable. While admitting mistakes were made, officers have denied any claims of impropriety.
They point out they were faced with some 70 live terrorism investigations, including a plot to blow up US-bound airliners in mid-flight, and that was why the original inquiry was so limited.
Yates, who denied suggestions from lawmakers last week he had been pressurised by News International over his private life, said he had endured a huge amount of “inaccurate, ill-informed and on occasion downright malicious gossip”.
Announcing his resignation, Stephenson also fired thinly-veiled criticism at Cameron over his decision to hire former News of the World editor and Wallis’s former boss Andy Coulson as his media chief.
However, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the police watchdog, said they would now consider a formal probe into the actions of Stephenson, Yates, Hayman and the officer who led the initial inquiry.
Piranhas
“If News International did the things that they are alleged to have done, it’s disgusting and people should be called to account for it,” Smyth told Reuters.
He compared critics calling for senior police heads to roll to piranhas in a feeding frenzy.
Professor Martin Innes, a leading criminologist based at Cardiff University, told Reuters the crisis was as damaging for police morale as any the Met had faced in recent times.
“I know some of the officers on the ground will be just rolling their eyes at all of this and thinking what has this got to do with real policing,” Innes said.
One source at the Met told Reuters: “No one likes to work for an organisation that is being criticised and scrutinised like this.”
London Mayor Boris Johnson said authorities would move swiftly to replace Stephenson while Yates had already been replaced by assistant commissioner Cressida Dick.
She is no stranger to controversy herself, having headed an operation which led to an innocent Brazilian electrician being shot dead by police in July 2005 after he was mistaken for a would-be suicide bomber.
Changes at the top would not end the affair, one former police officer told Reuters.
“The important questions remain: What were the News of the World and other newspapers doing in ‘hacking’ and ‘blagging’ [getting information by deception]?
“And why did public institutions for so long look the other way?” the officer said.
Chief Constable of Yorkshire Police Norman Bettison, mooted as a possible replacement for Stephenson, said any corrupt police officer should be dealt with, but there was a sense that police wrongdoing provided a useful distraction for the media.
“Those individuals are below contempt within the police service,” he told Reuters in an interview last week, saying they were “selling their soul to the devil”.
“This is not a systemic or universal issue. And it suits the press sometimes and particularly when they’re under pressure to paint it as such.”
Meanwhile, in New York, relatives of victims of the September 11 attacks have asked to meet the FBI and the United States Justice Department to discuss the agencies’ preliminary inquiry into reports that News Corp reporters may have tried to hack the phones of 9/11 victims.
US authorities have acknowledged they are looking into a report by Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper that reporters with the rival News of the World offered to pay a New York police officer for private phone records of some 9/11 victims.
The Mirror‘s report, citing an unidentified source, has yet to be independently verified but already has fueled US emotions over the wider phone hacking scandal that has consumed Britain and rocked Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp media empire.
— Reuters, Sapa-AP