Britain Arrests 2 in Phone-Hacking Case

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: April 5, 2011

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LONDON — Scotland Yard said Tuesday that two men had been arrested for questioning as part of its renewed inquiry into the illegal hacking of private voice-mail messages by The News of the World, the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper that is one of Britain’s most widely circulated tabloids.
The two were “arrested on suspicion of unlawfully intercepting mobile phone voice-mail messages,” according to an official police statement, and were being held for questioning at two separate police stations in southwest London. In accordance with British legal practice in cases where suspects have been arrested but not charged, the statement did not name the two men.
But a person familiar with the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity in the absence of authorization to speak publicly on the matter, identified one as Ian Edmondson, who was fired as the tabloid’s news editor in January. His dismissal came as News Group Newspapers, a division of the Murdoch publishing empire that includes The News of the World, announced that it was intensifying its efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal, and promised to give Scotland Yard comprehensive assistance in pursuing its investigation. The source named the other man under arrest as Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter for The News of the World.
The arrests marked a potentially decisive turning point in an investigation that has been under way, often fitfully, for more than five years, when a Scotland Yard inquiry into complaints by three members of Britain’s royal family, including Prince William and Prince Harry, uncovered a pattern of illegal hacking into the princes’ cellphone messages. Until Tuesday, the two men convicted and jailed in 2007 for their role in the hacking were the only people to have been arrested in the affair. They are Clive Goodman, formerly the tabloid’s royalty reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator.
But momentum has gathered in recent weeks, following an announcement by Scotland Yard in January that, in effect, it was reopening its inquiry and entrusting it to a new team independent of its previous investigation. There was widespread criticism of that inquiry, which was led by one of the yard’s most senior officers, Assistant Commissioner John Yates, as well as of the Crown Prosecution Service, the agency responsible for reviewing police evidence and laying criminal charges, after the prosecutors concluded last year that there was insufficient evidence to support any new prosecutions.
The critics of Mr. Yates’s inquiry included members of Parliament and prominent figures from the worlds of politics, entertainment, sports and other fields whose names and cellphone numbers had appeared on a list of celebrities that the police recovered from Mr. Mulcaire, the private investigator. The list appeared to be a phone book of potential hacking targets. Some critics suggested that Scotland Yard’s failure to press its inquiry harder had its roots in a long history of covert cooperation in exchanging tips between the police and some of Britain’s leading newspapers, particularly The News of the World, an inference that was forcefully repudiated by Scotland Yard.
Some critics have gone further, suggesting that the political influence of the Murdoch empire — which owns several other major titles in Britain, including The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times, as well as its 39 percent shareholding in the BSkyB satellite-broadcasting conglomerate — has compounded a reluctance to pursue the case more vigorously. The Labour Party government defeated in elections last May enjoyed strong editorial backing for more than a decade from The Sun, Britain’s most widely circulated daily, and The Sun’s switch in the May election to the Conservative Party was considered to be a significant factor in Labour’s defeat.