MPS WILL conduct an inquiry into the laws governing the investigation of telephone hacking in the United Kingdom after a senior Metropolitan Police officer said some attempts were difficult to prosecute.
The inquiry by the House of Commons home affairs committee, however, will not specifically deal with the fresh accusations levelled against prime minister David Cameron’s top press adviser, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson.
During an appearance before the committee yesterday, assistant commissioner John Yates said telephone hacking was very narrowly defined in legislation and was “very, very difficult to prove”, while lawyers had advised detectives that obtaining a mobile phone user’s pin was not a crime.
He repeated his assurance that former deputy prime minister John Prescott’s mobile was not hacked into and that there was no evidence any MP’s number had been tapped. It was a “dangerous assumption” to believe people named on lists kept by News of the World-hired private investigator Glen Mulcaire had been eavesdropped, he told MPs.
Labour’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, kept the pressure on Mr Cameron by writing to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson to ask him to warn any of the party’s MPs “if their name, phone number or pin number appears in the list of phones uncovered in your investigation into phone tapping by the News of the World”.
Meanwhile, the New York Times, which last week published the results of a five-month investigation into the News of the World's use of telephone interceptions – which saw one of its reporters jailed – said it would not co-operate with any new policy inquiry into the affair, saying that detectives had all the information they needed to pursue a full inquiry into allegations that thousands of telephones were hacked.
New York Timesexecutive editor Bill Keller said: "Our story . . . makes clear that the police already have evidence that they have chosen not to pursue."
