Bond of police and NotW too close: Leveson
POLICE and officials from the News of the World newspaper stalled early attempts to investigate allegations of phone hacking by its journalists, the Leveson inquiry was told yesterday.
Former police commander Brian Paddick wrote in a statement that officers had evidence of “hundreds” of phone hacking victims in 2006.
He said police decided to “warn all these victims that they had been targeted” but he believed at least 800 people were kept in the dark.
Chief counsel to the inquiry, Robert Jay, said an email to the paper’s then-editor Andy Coulson said Rebekkah Brooks had been “relayed” information about the scope of the hacking in 2006. He claimed that the relationship between police and the media, was “if not actually corrupt, very close to it”.