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Police arrest 5 as hacking scandal spreads to Sun tabloid

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January 29, 2012|By John F. Burns

LONDON - A Scotland Yard team investigating the bribery of police officers by journalists searched the offices of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship British tabloid, The Sun, yesterday after arresting a police officer and four men identified as current or former journalists at the paper. A police statement said searches were also being conducted at the homes of the arrested men.

The arrests appeared to mark an intensification of the police investigation into the role of The Sun, Britain’s highest circulation daily newspaper, in the illegal news-gathering techniques that prompted Murdoch, 80, to close The Sun’s sister newspaper, the weekend News of the World, last summer. Police investigations of wrongdoing at News of the World, involving the illegal hacking of cellphone voicemail messages and the alleged bribery of police officers for leaking confidential information, have led to the arrest of more than a dozen reporters, editors, executives, and others who worked for that paper.

A statement issued by Murdoch’s News Corp. in New York said the arrests yesterday resulted from information provided to the police by the company’s Management and Standards Committee, which was charged by Murdoch last year with rooting out what the company called “unacceptable news-gathering practices by individuals’’ at the newspapers of the company’s British subsidiary, News International.

The company’s cooperation with the police investigation was part of its commitment, the statement said, “to undertake a review of all News International titles, regardless of cost, and to proactively cooperate with law enforcement and other authorities if potentially relevant information arose at those titles.’’

That review has run in parallel to the company’s efforts to reach out-of-court settlements with politicians, celebrities, and others who have been identified by the police as among at least 800 victims of illegal voicemail hacking. This month, Murdoch executives reached court-approved settlements amounting to nearly $1 million with 37 phone-hacking victims, including Jude Law, the actor; Ashley Cole, the soccer star; and John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister.

The police said that three of the men arrested yesterday were taken from their homes in London and neighboring areas of Essex County for questioning on suspicion of conspiracy in actions involving “aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office,’’ the criminal offense commonly applied to cases of bribery of public officials. The fourth man was arrested when he appeared at an East London police station, the police statement said.

The police officer involved, a 29-year-old man serving in the territorial policing command of the Metropolitan Police, the formal name for Scotland Yard, was arrested while at work at a central London police station.