‘Evidence was destroyed’ in newspaper phone scandal

Court documents from cases connected to the phone-hacking scandal reveal a pattern of destruction of evidence ordered by senior employees of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

One of the documents states that the deletion of all of the News of the World’s email archives from before September 2007, which included the entire period when phone-hacking was rampant at the Sunday tabloid, was undertaken as recently as January 2011. The documents show that despite warnings from lawyers working for victims of the News of the World’s phone-hacking that the company should preserve evidence, NI set out to delete emails that might incriminate the company. According to The Daily Telegraph, which said it obtained the documents with the permission of the High Court judge hearing dozens of phone-hacking civil suits, employees at NI were ordered to delete damaging emails.