The press on trial :The Leveson Inquiry

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Evidence implicates 28 Murdoch journalists; The Sun named in phone hacker's notebook; Judge warns press not to victimise witnesses
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-press-on-trial-6262424.html

Police have uncovered new evidence that phone hacking was endemic at Rupert Murdoch's News International until as recently as 2009 – part of a "thriving cottage industry" of lawbreaking that involved "at least" 28 of the company's employees, the Leveson Inquiry was told yesterday.

The dramatic first proceedings of the judicial inquiry into press standards also heard that notebooks seized in 2006 from the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who carried out phone hacking for the News of the World, suggest he also worked for The Sun and "maybe" the Daily Mirror.

The inquiry has been provided with material from Scotland Yard that suggests "wide-ranging, illegal activity" at Wapping dating back to the hacking of the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler in 2002 and continuing "until at least 2009" – three years after two employees were arrested and later jailed for hacking.

The suggestion that the Yard's Operation Weeting has discovered evidence beyond Mulcaire's notebooks that voicemail interception carried on beyond his imprisonment in 2007 would be devastating for the Murdoch empire. Senior executives vowed repeatedly that the practice was halted in 2006.