News of the World reaches new low

For those readers who are not familiar with this paper the News of the World is the best selling Sunday tabloid in Britain..that Rupert Murdoch Is the owner gives an indication of the quality of this newspaper.. Basically it is a foul little rag owned by a revolting shit and read by the scum of Britain.

It has pulled some pretty vile stunts in the past. Currently it is the subject of a renewed criminal investigation relating to phone hacking, mainly of celebrities. (The paper’s royal editor and a private investigator were sent to prison back in 2007 for hacking phones in the Royal Household). However, it has done far worse than invading the privacy of some celebrities.

Milly Dowler was a thirteen year old girl who disappeared from her family in March 2002. Her body was found several months later but it was not until late last month that her murdered, Levi Bellfield was sent to prison for the rest of his life (His life sentence is a life, no parole, sentence). According to the Guardian, the News of the World illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl and her family in March 2002, hacking her phone, interfering with messages and basically hindering police inquiries into her disappearance.

Detectives from Scotland Yard's inquiry into the NOTW phone hacking, Operation Weeting, are believed to have found evidence of the targeting of the Dowlers in a collection of 11,000 pages of notes kept by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator jailed for phone hacking on behalf of the News of the World.

In the last four weeks the Met officers have approached Surrey police and taken formal statements from some of those involved in the original inquiry, who were concerned about how News of the World journalists intercepted – and deleted – the voicemail messages of Milly Dowler.

The messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly's disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive. Police feared evidence may have been destroyed.

The Guardian investigation has shown that, within a very short time of Milly vanishing, News of the World journalists reacted by engaging in what was standard practice in their newsroom: they hired private investigators to get them a story.

Paperwork seen by the Guardian reveals that they paid a Hampshire private investigator, Steve Whittamore, to obtain home addresses and, where necessary, ex-directory phone numbers for any families called Dowler in the Walton area. The three addresses Whittamore found could be obtained lawfully on the electoral register. The two ex-directory numbers, however, were "blagged" illegally from British Telecom's confidential records by one of Whittamore's associates, John Gunning, who works from a base in Wiltshire. One of the ex-directory numbers was attributed by Whittamore to Milly's family home.

Then, with the help of its own full-time private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World started illegally intercepting mobile phone messages. Scotland Yard is now investigating evidence that the paper hacked directly into the voicemail of the missing girl's own phone. As her friends and parents called and left messages imploring Milly to get in touch with them, the News of the World was listening and recording their every private word.

But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly's voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the News of the World intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.

The Dowler family then granted an exclusive interview to the News of the World in which they talked about their hope, quite unaware that it had been falsely kindled by the newspaper's own intervention. Sally Dowler told the paper: "If Milly walked through the door, I don't think we'd be able to speak. We'd just weep tears of joy and give her a great big hug."
The deletion of the messages also caused difficulties for the police by confusing the picture when they had few leads to pursue.It also potentially destroyed valuable evidence.

According to one senior source familiar with the Surrey police investigation: "It can happen with abduction murders that the perpetrator will leave messages, asking the missing person to get in touch, as part of their efforts at concealment. We need those messages as evidence. Anybody who destroys that evidence is seriously interfering with the course of a police investigation."
The paper made little effort to conceal the hacking from its readers.

On 14 April 2002, it published a story about a woman allegedly pretending to be Milly Dowler who had applied for a job with a recruitment agency: "It is thought the hoaxer even gave the agency Milly's real mobile number … The agency used the number to contact Milly when a job vacancy arose and left a message on her voicemail … It was on March 27, six days after Milly went missing, that the employment agency appears to have phoned her mobile."

The newspaper also made no effort to conceal its activity from Surrey police. After it had hacked the message from the recruitment agency on Milly's phone, the paper informed police about it.

At the time, Surrey police suspected that phones belonging to detectives and to Milly's parents also were being targeted. However, they took no action against the News of the World, partly because their main focus was to find the missing schoolgirl and partly because this was only one example of tabloid misbehaviour. As one source close to the inquiry put it: "There was a hell of a lot of dirty stuff going on." Two earlier Yard inquiries had failed to investigate the relevant notes in Mulcaire's logs.

The News of the World's parent company News International, "We have been co-operating fully with Operation Weeting since our voluntary disclosure in January restarted the investigation into illegal voicemail interception. This particular case is clearly a development of great concern and we will be conducting our own inquiries. We will obviously co-operate fully with any police request on this should we be asked."

Oh yes I am sure they will cooperate now that this out, the hypocritical bastards.

Words utterly fail me. Well no they don’t. If there is a tenth of the truth in the allegations then as far as I am cocerned the private investigators involved should be imprisoned along with the journalists involved. Not only that but every single person in the chain of command is as culpable and should be brought to account.

While I consider the NOTW staff to be something akin to the shit on a paedophle’s boot, the garbage who buy this rag are just as guilty.