Former editor of News of the World Andy Coulson testified for a second day at the trial of the alleged wrongdoing at the British unit of News Corp, Bloomberg said. He told the court that he has "vague" knowledge about phone hacking that allegedly existed in the news tabloid and rejected the notion that he was aware of the interception of a murdered school girl's messages for a story. The scandal over the alleged hacking of the Milly Dowler's messages had led the tabloid to shut down ten years later.
"I was aware of it in very vague terms of phone hacking in 2002. It was in the ether (and was) gossiped about, maybe," Coulson, who became Prime Minister David Cameron's media adviser, said today.
The 46 year-old is one of the seven people who has been charged for various illegal activities allegedly done at the UK newspapers of News Corp. The charges reportedly include phone hacking and bribing public officials. The discovery of hacking Dowler's messages in 2011 had earned a public outcry, which not only shut down the tabloid, but also forced News Corp to cancel plans to acquire British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc, Bloomberg said.
Coulson, who was at that time the deputy editor of the News of the World, was in charge of the newspaper the week that it published a story about Dowler and her messages on her phone. Rebekah Brooks, who is also named as the defendant on the case and was also the editor of the weekly tabloid at that time, was on vacation when the story ran.
One of the messages that News of The World decided to withdraw was supposedly coming from a recruitment agency offering Dowler a job. Later editions of the story no longer contained the message, as police have said that the message came from a prank caller, prosecutors noted in the trial.
when Coulson was cross-examined about his knowledge about phone hacking, he said, "I would have thought it was intrusive. That it was a breach of privacy and I also would have thought that it was lazy. "I presumed it was to do with voice-mail messages. I think I knew, possibly heard, that it was to do with access to these voice mails via pin codes, that people have default pin codes and therefore they could be accessed."
