Murdoch's UK firm pays damages to ex-spy in hacking scandal

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press


Updated 2:50 pm, Friday, October 6, 2017

LONDON (AP) — Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper company has agreed to pay damages to a former intelligence officer whose computer was hacked by detectives working for Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid, lawyers said Friday.

Ian Hurst, who ran agents inside the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, sued Murdoch's News Group Newspapers after learning from a BBC news report in 2011 that his emails had been hacked.

Hurst's lawyer, Jeremy Reed, said at the High Court in London that News Group acknowledged the agent's emails had been intercepted "routinely and intensively" over several months in 2006.

Reed said when he found out, Hurst "feared for the safety of many of the people with whom he had been in contact," who included people in the witness protection program.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Murdoch-s-UK-firm-pays-damages-to-ex-spy-in-12258527.php

[SergeStorms]

1. I wish...

they would have reported how much Murdoch's paper had to pay. Whatever it is, it isn't enough. Bankrupt the son-of-a-bitch. He deserves nothing less for the problems he's caused in this world.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. The News of the World was involved with dangerous criminals, so this info mattered

In 2002 Cook was asked to join the investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan. Morgan had been brutally murdered with an axe 15 years previously in a pub car park in Sydenham, South London. One of the suspects in that murder was Jonathan Rees.

Rees ran an organization called Southern Investigations. In 1987, when Morgan was murdered, Rees was his business partner. Southern Investigations worked closely with a number of Metropolitan Police officers. Southern Investigations also did lots of investigations for national newspapers. One of Rees’ biggest clients was the News of the World.
...
A week later, the News of the World put Cook and Hames under surveillance. White vans were parked outside her house, and she and her husband were trailed. This included trailing David Cook while he walked his son and daughter to school. Not surprisingly, given Hames and Cook were part of a nasty murder investigation, this was frightening for their family.
...
No, the real motivation appears to be far more sinister. Hames believes that ‘suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper [the News of the World] to try to intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation’.

http://hackinginquiry.org/comment/the-triple-betrayal-of-jacqui-hames/

So Murdoch tabloid employees can never be trusted with sensitive info like details of informants or witnesses. They might give them to anyone.

[rockfordfile]

3. Good