Latest Hacking Scandal Arrest Suggests Focus on Cover-Up
Scotland Yard’s arrest of a former personal assistant to Rebekah Brooks, a former chief executive of the British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, appears to reflect the investigators’ intensifying focus on the possibility of a cover-up by executives, editors and others of the extent of illegal phone hacking and other criminal wrongdoing at the News of the World, which is now defunct.
Rebekah Brooks, a former executive with the News Corporation. A former personal assistant to Ms. Brooks has been arrested in connection with a hacking scandal.
After 10 hours of questioning on Friday, detectives assigned to a special unit investigating the affair released the assistant, Cheryl Carter, 47, on police bail pending further questioning. She was arrested at dawn at her home in Billericay, 25 miles east of London. Efforts to reach her for comment on Saturday were not successful.
Scotland Yard said she was the 17th person, most of them former employees of the News of the World, to be arrested by officers assigned to Operation Weeting, established last year under special provisions intended to ensure the independence of the investigators.
The creation of that task force followed several years of faltering inquiries by Scotland Yard that upheld, until a torrent of disclosures last year, denials by News International that more than two people on the News of the World’s newsroom staff had been involved in the illegal interception of the cellphone voicemails of crime victims, politicians and celebrities.
As the scandal grew last year, dominating headlines in Britain for months, the police inquiry, and hearings by a parliamentary committee, began to focus on allegations that executives, editors and others involved had conspired to cover up the extent of the wrongdoing, which Scotland Yard said last month had involved the hacking of the cellphones of at least 800 people.
One of the executives who has been under pressure is James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, who leads News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, and has long been considered a candidate to succeed his father as head of the company. The police investigation and testimony before a parliamentary committee identified a 2009 meeting in London attended by James Murdoch as crucial to unraveling the issue of whether senior executives conspired in the cover-up.