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Did Police Ignore Evidence in Britain's Phone-Hacking Scandal?

The U.K.'s leading Sunday tabloid, Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, may be at the center of the phone-hacking affair that has gripped Britain, seen a reporter and a private investigator jailed, brought down the Prime Minister's spin doctor and on Wednesday sparked a second police investigation. But the scandal is now threatening to spill over the paper's borders and engulf the entire British newspaper industry and even Scotland Yard.

It's been five years since the original hacking investigation was launched, when Prince William told police that he believed his aides' mobile-phone voicemails had been accessed by someone else after the News of the World printed a story about a knee injury he had suffered. Since then, Britain's highly-regarded Metropolitan police force has found itself under intense pressure over accusations that it has willfully tried to keep the lid on this particular affair, because it fears that a thorough investigation will reveal a cozy relationship between its officers and the media.

And there have been persistent allegations that hacking was not limited to a couple of rogue reporters or to just one newspaper, but that it was a widespread practice throughout the ranks of Britain's printed press. A former MP, Paul Marsden, recently claimed, for example, that his phone was hacked by the Daily Mirror newspaper in 2003 and says he may take legal action. Meanwhile, a list of celebrities including actress Sienna Miller and comedian Steve Coogan are pursuing civil action against the News of the World over the alleged hacking of their phones, and the BBC says it has seen legal documents suggesting the practice was going on at the paper until last year - a claim denied by the organization.

All this pressure finally came to a head on Wednesday when the News of the World announced it had fired executive editor, Ian Edmondson, and handed new information to the police - said to be emails showing that he was aware of what some of his reporters were doing. The fact this move to clean house happened as Murdoch is in London and the government is considering whether to allow his bid to take full control of pay-TV station BSkyB may not be a coincidence.

Scotland Yard's statement announcing the new investigation was marked by the decision to put the probe under the control of the Yard's specialist crime directorate, a separate unit that was not involved in the previous, much- criticized inquiry. That investigation was closed in 2007, after the newspaper's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and private investigator Glen Mulcaire were convicted of being involved in phone hacking and were jailed for four and six months respectively. But many believe that investigation wasn't thorough enough.

In a 2009 parliamentary inquiry following the first police investigation, newspaper executives insisted they had no evidence that the practice of hacking involved any employees other than Goodman and Mulcaire. Former News of the World's editor Andy Coulson insisted to the inquiry that he had no knowledge of hacking by his reporters; nonetheless he had still taken responsibility for the affair and had resigned in 2007. He was swiftly employed later that year as the Conservative Party's communications chief and followed David Cameron into Downing Street. But the hacking scandal has refused to die down, and Coulson quit last week.

Other newspapers may well find themselves caught up in the new investigation, but it is the role of the police that may yet prove the most controversial. Specifically, the suspicion that individual officers were routinely paid for information by newspaper reporters.

Labour MP Tom Watson, a member of parliament's culture committee, which launched its own inquiry into the scandal in 2009, says he finds it unfathomable that Scotland Yard did not take its original inquiry further when it had what he calls "a pile of evidence" that other journalists were involved in hacking, much gleaned from private investigator Mulcaire's files which included lists of hundreds of celebrity and political "targets." Even former prime minister Gordon Brown said earlier this week that he has asked police to investigate whether his mobile phone was hacked.

"There is plenty of speculation over why the police appear to have not gone further," Watson told TIME. "There is obviously a close working relationship between [Murdoch's] News International stable of newspapers and the Metropolitan police."

The Met has always insisted it had insufficient evidence to proceed further. Still, a member of the police committee which oversees the role of the Met, Jenny Jones, told the BBC on Wednesday: "I think the Met's motives are now so contaminated by suspicion and doubt that they are going to find it difficult to be trusted on this."

In one unrelated inquiry by the culture committee in 2003, the then-editor of the Sun tabloid, Rebekah Brooks - who is now chief executive of News International - appeared to add fuel to the fire when she told MPs: "We have paid the police for information in the past." After the session, Alison Clark, the director of corporate affairs at News International, called reporters to say: "It is not company practice to pay police for information."

And it is not an issue that many in the British media want to discuss. Confidentially, national newspaper reporters will suggest they have on occasion paid police contacts for information. What will now be worrying those reporters and Scotland Yard is that these dark arts of journalism will be subjected to the full glare of daylight.

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