- LONDON: The official who supervised the UK police’s much-criticized initial inquiry into Britain’s phone hacking scandal says a crush of terrorism cases meant he had no choice but to curtail media investigation.
Former Scotland Yard counterterrorism chief Peter Clarke says his force was so stretched by the threat of Al-Qaeda attacks in 2005 it had to enlist 1,000 officers from other police bodies.
He said Thursday that the overload lasted for years and overlapped with the first investigation into journalists’ illegal interception of voice-mail messages.
That first police inquiry only resulted in two convictions in 2007 linked to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid. The scandal re-erupted last year as new evidence emerged of systematic wrongdoing across several newspapers.
