News Of The World Also Accused Of Computer Hacking, Mass E-Mail Deletion

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Scotland Yard announced Saturday that it will set up a new task force to investigate allegations that News Of The World reporters took part in computer hacking as well as phone hacking.

“Operation Tuleta is currently considering a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy, received by the MPS since January 2011, which fall outside the remit of (phone-hacking) Operation Weeting, including computer hacking,” the police said in a statement.

Though the police did not go into details, the New York Times reports that Ian Hurst, an ex-intelligence officer for the British Army, put out a statement saying investigators had contacted him about allegations he made “in regards to my family’s computer being illegally accessed over a sustained period during 2006.”

On Monday The Guardian reported that British tech firm HCL sent a letter to the chairman of the home affairs select committee of Parliament saying it had helped News International in nine instances of mass e-mail deletion, between April 2010 and July 2011. Though, according to the letter, HCL was not the primary company in charge of storing the e-mails, and they were not aware of anything “abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role.” But the company said the deleted e-mails numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

The phone hacking scandal that has primarily plagued News Corp and its subsidiaries for the past few weeks has also begun to pull in U.K.’s Trinity Mirror group, which publishes the tabloid The Daily Mirror and The Sunday Mirror . Much of the increased scrutiny is related to CNN anchor Piers Morgan, who edited the Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004. One former journalist at the Mirror says phone hacking was “endemic” at the paper during Morgan’s tenure, though Morgan has emphatically denied that he knew anything about it.

Trinity Mirror had announced an internal investigation into whether any phone hacking occurred at any of its holdings, though it called the claims “totally unsubstantiated.” But the Sunday Times (which is owned by News Corp) reported over the weekend that legal action for “three or four cases” against Trinity Mirror holdings could soon be filed at Britain’s High Court. Mark Lewis, who is representing dozens of people suing News Of The World over the hackings, told the Times that lawsuits are expected to be filed in the next month.

One of the lawsuits reportedly relates to Paul Marsden, an ex-Liberal Democrat MP, who alleges his phone was hacked in 2003.

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