Murdoch shuts down paper which hacked phones of war,terror victims

The decision was announced so suddenly that the paper,News of the World,was still advertising a subscription deal on its website.

The new reports of stunning intrusions came a day after Britain’s parliament collectively turned on Rupert Murdoch,the head of the News Corporation,which owns News of the World,and the tabloid culture he represents,using a debate about the widening phone hacking scandal to denounce reporting tactics by newspapers once seen as too politically influential to challenge.

From all sides of the House of Commons,the disgust came thick and fast as legislators recited the most recent allegations against the paper: that its executives had paid police officers,lied to Parliament,hired investigators to intercept voice mail messages left on the cellphones of murdered children and terrorism victims,and,in one instance,tampered with a murder investigation in which the suspects were linked to News of the World. Legislators also attacked the tabloid news media in general for employing similar tactics.

“We have let one man have far too great a sway over our national life,” said Chris Bryant,a Labour member of Parliament. In addition to News of the World,Murdoch’s media holdings include The Times and The Sunday Times of London; The Sun; and a large stake in BSkyB,as it is called,as well as several other international newspapers and television networks.

The scandal is taking a toll on News Corp.,with stock prices falling and new questions about Murdoch’s proposed $12-billion takeover of the pay-television company British Sky Broadcasting. Many legislators criticized the deal on Wednesday,and Britain’s media regulatory agency,Ofcom,said it was “closely monitoring the situation.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron,whose Conservative Party benefits from Murdoch’s support,has not yet called for an immediate investigation into behaviour by News of the World and other tabloids. Such an inquiry would have to wait,he said,until the police had concluded their own criminal investigation.

Unease about the phone hacking tactics of some reporters had been growing for months,but the public mood turned to shock and revulsion this week after The Guardian reported that the targets of the voice mail interception — originally presumed to be restricted to the famous — included the phone of Milly Dowler,a 13-year-old schoolgirl abducted and murdered in 2002.

Then,new reports said the families of people killed in the July 7,2005,bombings in the London transit system had also been listened to without their knowledge or permission.

The current head of News Corp. in Britain,Rebekah Brooks,had come under enormous scrutiny,since she was the editor of News of the World during the Dowler case. On Wednesday,a Labour member of Parliament made another startling assertion: that while Brooks was the editor,she was confronted with evidence that the paper was using unlawful means to interrupt a murder investigation whose two main suspects had ties to the paper.

The member,Tom Watson,said that senior Scotland Yard officials met with Brooks in 2002 to alert her of evidence that members of her staff were “guilty of interference and party to using unlawful means to attempt to discredit a police officer and his wife,” so that the officer would be unable to complete a murder investigation.

On Thursday,The Guardian reported that Muranchak had apparently agreed to allow the two murder suspects in the case to use photographers and vans leased to the paper to spy on Detective Chief Superintendent David Cook,the lead detective.

The two men,private investigators named Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery,were suspected of murdering their former partner,Daniel Morgan,who had been killed 15 years earlier. Their targeting of Cook included following him,his wife,and their children,trying to access his and his wife’s voice mail and obtaining personal details about him from police databases.

Those details were found in the notes of Glenn Mulcaire,an investigator working for News of the World whose notebooks were seized by the police and have formed the basis for much of the current criminal investigation into phone hacking.

On Thursday,after The Daily Telegraph said a private detective working for News of the World may have hacked into the phones of bereaved families after they were informed of the death of relatives serving with the British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan,the Royal British Legion,a veterans’ organization,said that it had dropped the newspaper as its partner in a campaign for improved service conditions. The group said that “bereaved military families expressed revulsion at the latest phone hacking revelations.”

The Times of London,itself a News Corporation newspaper,said five journalists and the newspaper executives suspected of involvement in the scandal were expected to be arrested within days.

Many legislators also focused their outrage on Brooks,who is now News International’s chief executive and a protégé of Murdoch. She is a close friend of Cameron’s — the two have country houses near each other and have often socialized — and has been a strong champion of his premiership. Ed Miliband,the Labour leader,said Brooks should resign.

In a separate development,news reports this week indicated that Andy Coulson,editor of News of the World in the mid-2000s,appeared to have authorized illegal payments to police officers during his time at the paper. News International has confirmed that the information is contained in e-mails it has disclosed to the police.

The disclosure is relevant because of Coulson’s close ties to the Conservative Party. After resigning from News of the World in 2007 after an earlier phone hacking investigation,Coulson was quickly hired by Cameron as the Conservative Party’s chief spokesman. The move gave Cameron an in with SARAH LYALL & ALAN COWELL