British police faced new allegations yesterday that officers leaked details about terror attack victims and a murdered schoolgirl to journalists at Rupert Murdoch’s felled News of the World tabloid.
The claims deepen the scandal surrounding phone-hacking at the paper, which has shaken Mr Murdoch’s global media empire, claimed the jobs of two of Britain’s top police officers and dragged in Prime Minister David Cameron.
The Observer newspaper reported that survivors of the July 7, 2005 London bombings had asked lawyers to probe their belief that the capital’s Metropolitan Police had sold or passed on a confidential contact list of victims.
Beverli Rhodes, chair of the Survivors Foundation Coalition, said journalists from the paper approached survivors with false stories about how they got their details.
“Scotland Yard had the full list of survivor contact details. I am pretty sure that is how the News of the World got my home address,” she told the Observer.
Four suicide bombers blew themselves up on three underground trains and a bus in the worst terror attacks on British soil, killing 52 people.
Separately the BBC reported that police had removed an officer from the inquiry into the murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler in 2002 after information was allegedly leaked to the News of the World (NotW).
Police in Surrey, a county southwest of London, confirmed that a detective constable was accused by a colleague of inappropriately disclosing information about the case to a “retired police officer friend”.
The officer “received words of advice and was removed permanently from the inquiry”, the force said in a statement. It did not mention the NotW.
The tabloid has already been accused of hacking Ms Dowler’s voicemails and those of families of 7/7 victims, but this is the first time police have directly been linked to the paper’s activities on the two events.
Mr Murdoch has now closed the NotW and personally apologised to Ms Dowler’s parents.
Revelations that police employed a former NotW executive who has since been arrested over hacking claimed the jobs of Scotland Yard chief Paul Stephenson and the force’s anti-terror boss John Yates a week ago.
Scotland Yard was heavily criticised for botching an initial investigation, which resulted in the jailing of the paper’s former royal editor and a private investigator in 2007 but concluded he was was a “rogue reporter”.
When the force bowed to pressure and reopened the probe in January it emerged that nearly 4,000 people may have had their phones hacked.
Other British papers were dragged into the row last weekend when former journalists at the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror – Mr Murdoch’s main British tabloid rivals – reportedly said phone-hacking was rife at their papers too.
However, the main effects have been on Mr Murdoch’s US-based News Corporation.