19 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
A retired criminal investigator has accused the News of the World of jeopardising the investigation into murder of five women in Ipswich in 2006.
Testifying before the Leveson Inquiry this morning, Dave Harrison was part of a Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) team deployed to the Ipswich murder inquiry, in which five women were killed between October and December 2006. His team’s objective was to put any suspect under surveillance.
He said he was told that the News of the World had employed their own surveillance team made up of “ex-special forces soldiers, whose objectives were to identify any suspects we were working on, and to identify us and our operation base.”
“Someone in the police had found out that SOCA was being deployed and passed this information to the media,” Harrison wrote in his witness statement.
Harrison added that a surveillance team from the Sunday Mirror was also employed to “pick up and interview” the first suspect in the inquiry. In his witness statement, Harrison wrote that colleagues watched the suspect “being picked up and driven round by a team that carried out anti-surveillance manoeuvres before dropping him off at a hotel to be interviewed.”
Harrison said he believed the News of the World surveillance jeopardised the murder investigation by potentially hindering SOCA’s own surveillance. He told the Inquiry that a murder suspect, revisiting the scene of the crime, might halt or change his movements if they believed they were being followed. “The evidence would be lost and the prosecution case weakened.”
“If our surveillance had been weakened by having to try and avoid other surveillance teams looking for us, if we had lost the suspect he may have gone on and committed further murders,” Harrison added.
“If we had lost the suspect because of their actions there could have been tragic consequences.”
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15 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Alastair Brett, former legal manager at the Times, faced an intense grilling at the Leveson Inquiry today over the circumstances in which a reporter at the paper used email hacking to reveal the identity of anonymous police blogger, NightJack, in a 2009 story.
Former Times reporter Patrick Foster had identified the blogger as DC Richard Horton by gaining access to an anonymous email account run by Horton, the Inquiry heard last month.
Brett told the Inquiry he was “furious” with Foster when he approached him about the story and asked him if he had broken the law or if there was a public interest defence he could rely on. “I told him he had been incredibly stupid. He apologised, promised not to do it again,” Brett wrote in his witness statement.
“I was told it was a one-off occasion,” he said, “and I thought ‘I’ve got to tell him you cannot behave like this at a proper newspaper’.”
Email hacking is a breach of the Computer Misuse Act and does not have a public interest defence. Brett conceded he was unaware of the Act at the time.
He said Foster told him he could identify NightJack using publicly available sources of information. Brett told Foster that if this were possible then the Times would be able to publish the story, provided the reporter put it to Horton beforehand.
A stern and incredulous Lord Justice Leveson argued that the Times had misled the High Court over the unmasking of NightJack in their fight to overturn an injunction brought by Horton. He said Foster “used what he knew and found a way out to achieve the same result.”
Brett maintained Horton had been identified legitimately. “No he hadn’t, with great respect,” Leveson responded. “He couldn’t put out of his mind that which he already knew.”
Leveson also accused the Times of exposing wrongdoing “on the basis than an individual would not seek redress.”
“What the Times have done,” the judge said, “doesn’t that mean you’re justifying any route you wish to take to get a story provided it is true?”
Brett concluded the heated session by stressing he did not condone Foster’s methods. “In 33 years I was at the Times this was the one and only case I had,” he said. “God I wish I could have done without it.”
“If you could have been in the room with me and Patrick, I mean, the air was blue,” he said.
Earlier today the Inquiry heard from Daily Mail associate news editor and former crime editor Stephen Wright, who warned against examining contact between the police and the media “to the nth degree”, suggesting that rules banning informal contact between the two might be “abused by senior officers who seek to control the information flow.”
“It could lead to a corruption of a different kind,” he added.
The Inquiry continues on Monday.
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15 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
A leaked Daily Mail story about advances in the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence undermined the probe into the teenager’s death, the Leveson Inquiry heard this morning.
The Metropolitan police’s DCI Clive Driscoll, who led the re-opened inquiry into the teenager’s murder, described a November 2007 meeting he sought to hold in secret with Stephen’s mother, Doreen, and her lawyers.
Driscoll said while he was on the train home that evening, he received a phone call saying a story following the meeting would be running in the Daily Mail the next day.
“Stephen’s family were distraught about this,” Driscoll wrote in his witness statement, adding that the story “undermined” the Met’s relationship with the Lawrence family. “When this happened it was almost like going back to square one,” he wrote.
“Every time a story leaked to the press I had to repair relations with the family,” he wrote, adding later that the volume of leaks led him to believe that “someone was deliberately attempting to disrupt the investigation”.
Driscoll said he had “nothing but respect” for Stephen Wright, the Mail journalist whose name appeared on the November 2007 story. “No-one has tried harder, no organisation has tried harder to bring justice to Stephen’s parents,” Driscoll said, “but we were getting there, and it was undermining that inquiry, and I can’t understand that.”
“I have admiration with what the paper did in supporting the family, I have admiration in Mr Wright pursuing it. The bit I can’t understand is why, when you get there, you would then do anything to undermine it.”
Driscoll says he does not know who leaked the story about the meeting to the Mail. As a result, “everyone became a suspect”.
He added that Wright was spoken to by the police following the story and did not write a second piece. The journalist also maintained that the article did not come from a police source.
“I do not believe Mr Wright would have done anything to deliberately undermine the investigation,” Driscoll wrote.
The officer also thanked the paper for choosing not to publish another piece related to the Lawrence inquiry, which he said would have had “a serious consequence on the investigation we were planning.”
Driscoll admitted that the nature of Lawrence’s murder in 1993 — one of the “defining murders of its time”, he said — meant it would always generate a certain amount of press interest. In his written evidence he noted that a “significant amount” of information about the investigation was being leaked to the media, namely the News of the World, in October 2007. “This was incredibly damaging,” he wrote.
Also in the witness box this morning was the Sun’s crime editor, Mike Sullivan, who said he believes that the Metropolitan police have grading charts on individual journalists with a marking system to show the favourability of the coverage towards the police. Yet the Met’s counsel, Neil Garnham QC, denied this was the case.
Sullivan also criticised the Filkin report into press-police relations for its “patronising” tone towards journalists, adding that he does not know any journalists who will “pour alcohol” down sources’ necks to get a story.
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14 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The president of the Crime Reporters’ Association, Jeff Edwards, was encouraged by his former boss at the News of the World to bribe police officers for information, the Leveson Inquiry heard today.
Edwards joined the now defunct tabloid in 1981 and was appointed crime correspondent soon after. Around the end of 1983, his then line manager told him he was unhappy with his work, arguing that he was not producing enough stories.
Pressuring him to improve his performance, Edwards’ boss told him: “we have plenty of money available, let your contacts in the police know that we will reward them for good information.”
“I do not remember what I said in return but I remember being worried about both my job and what my boss was suggesting as I had never paid police officers before, and was worried about the legal and ethical issues involved,” Edwards wrote in his witness statement.
“No more was said for about three or four weeks, but I did not offer bribes or rewards to any police contacts and clearly my performance was still not good enough because the News Editor confronted me again. He was angry and again said words to the effect that I should be paying police officers to induce them to pass on information,” he continued.
“I do remember that I became upset and said to him that I disapproved strongly of such methods and said something on the lines that I thought we were about exposing hypocrisy and corruption and yet here we were with him instructing me to bribe police officers.”
Edwards added that he felt this was the “final nail” in his coffin: “I remember him becoming angry and saying words to the effect that ‘if you will not do my bidding I will find someone who will’.”
He was removed from his position as crime correspondent and returned to the main newsroom as a general reporter the following week.
Edwards said he worked with “many excellent and enterprising journalists who upheld the best traditions of the profession” at the News of the World, but noted his feeling that there was a “section of the staff who displayed dishonest and devious behaviour”. He said the culture at the Daily Mirror, where he later became chief crime correspondent, was “far removed” from that of the Sunday tabloid.
Elsewhere in his oral testimony, Edwards claimed the police operate on a “blame culture” during crises or scandals, and will take the “easier option” of closing down “as much engagement as possible.”
He advocated “delicate adjustments” being made to the rules of engagement between police and the press, pushing for a more “common sense” approach rather than what he termed a “carpet-bombing of the system.”
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with further evidence from crime reporters, as well as former Times lawyer Alastair Brett and Peter Tickner, former Director of Internal Audit at the Metropolitan police.
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