Police arrested Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor and close confidante of Rupert Murdoch, for a second time on Tuesday in the latest round of detentions in Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, Sky News reported.
British police confirmed they had held five men and one woman in dawn raids across the country on suspicion of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, with the woman described as 43 years old and living in Oxfordshire.
Brooks, a central figure in the phone hacking scandal, is 43 years old and lives in Oxfordshire. Sky News, which is part owned by Murdoch’s media group, said her husband, racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, had also been detained.
“The coordinated arrests were made between approximately 0500 and 0700 this morning by officers from Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police Service inquiry into the phone-hacking of voicemail boxes,” the police said in a statement.
“A number of addresses connected to the arrests are being searched.”
One of the descriptions of those arrested on Tuesday also fitted the description of James Murdoch, but two sources close to Murdoch said he was currently in the United States. The police did not name those it had arrested.
News Corp, Murdoch’s media empire which owns the now-defunct News of the World Sunday tabloid at the centre of the investigations, declined to comment on the latest arrests.
The long-running saga has shaken News Corp and damaged the police and politicians from all major political parties, revealing extremely close ties between the media and the upper elements of the establishment.
The 168-year-old News of the World was shut down in July at the height of the hacking scandal, while two of Britain’s most senior police officers quit their posts after being accused of failing to properly investigate the allegations.
HORSEGATE
The latest arrests could also bring further embarrassment to Prime Minister David Cameron, who finally admitted earlier this month that he had ridden a horse given to the high-profile Brooks couple by the police, in an episode dubbed “horsegate” by rival press.
Cameron, who has sought to distance himself from a wealthy background seen as an electoral weakness, said that he had been friends with Charlie Brooks for over 30 years.
Asked on Tuesday how concerned the prime minister was at the arrest of his “close friend” Charlie Brooks, a spokeswoman for Cameron said: “It’s an operational matter for the police,” and declined further comment.
Charlie and his wife Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested last year by police investigating phone hacking and corruption at the paper, live close to Cameron in one of England’s most expensive regions and have been labeled in the media as part of a wealthy “Chipping Norton set”.
Conspiring to pervert the course of justice, which so far in this investigation has meant the destruction of email evidence, could result in a more lengthy jail sentence than for phone-hacking itself.
The News of the World’s former royal reporter Clive Goodman and private detective Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for four and six months respectively in 2007 for phone-hacking offences.
A judge handling the civil law suits brought against News Corp has already criticized the company for deleting emails.
Charlie Brooks was himself dragged into the hacking scandal in July last year when police seized a bag containing a laptop computer and personal documents from close to the couple’s London apartment.
Brooks, who attempted to reclaim the bag, said at the time that the items had nothing to do with his wife and had simply been misplaced following a mix-up with a friend.
He had been due on Tuesday to attend the Cheltenham Festival, one of Britain’s most prestigious horse-racing events, — and had written a column for the Telegraph newspaper in which he described the opening day of Cheltenham as his happiest moment of the year.
Police working on Operation Weeting – which until Tuesday had seen 17 people arrested so far – said the five men and one woman were held at addresses in Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and East and West London.
They said the six were held following a consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service, the department which prosecutes criminal cases investigated by the police, but a spokesman would not say whether the six had been arrested before.
Operation Weeting was set up to investigate the allegation that journalists and investigators working for the News of the World tabloid repeatedly hacked into mobile phones to generate stories.
As part of that investigation, current and former News International journalists have been held on suspicion of making illegal payments to police and public officials, while others have been questioned over computer hacking.
