News of the World journalists who hacked Milly Dowler's phone told a string of lies and interfered with the investigation into her disappearance in 2002, according to a Surrey police report released by a parliamentary committee.
In a month that has already seen the News of the World apologise for hacking three dozen celebrities and crime victims, the Surrey report released on Monday paints an even more graphic picture of tabloid methods. It parallels the evidence revealed at the current Leveson inquiry into press behaviour.
However, the Surrey police report does not shed any further light on the still unresolved question of how voicemails came to be deleted from Dowler's phone. They say the Metropolitan police, which are investigating phone hacking at the News of the World, have still not reached a final conclusion.
"When and the extent to which Milly's mobile phone voicemail was unlawfully accessed (and whether any messages were deleted) are matters which form part of the MPS's ongoing investigation."
Last July, the Guardian reported that the NoW hacked Dowler's phone and deleted messages in the first few days after her disappearance in March 2002. After further inquiries, the Metropolitan police suggested in December that while the tabloid did hack Dowler's phone, it was unlikely to have been responsible for specific deletions that caused her parents to have false hopes that she was alive.
Today's published Surrey timeline, based on police logs from 2002, depicts a news organisation that tried to bully detectives into backing its own misguided theories, as police searched desperately for clues about the girl who went missing on March 21 2002.
According to the file, the reporters were so confident of their own power that they openly admitted the paper had obtained tapes of the voicemails on Dowler's phone. Their misinterpretation of the messages then made them mistakenly believe she was still alive.
Rather than tell her family and police of this important information, however, it appears they concentrated on getting a scoop. Reporters made calls to an employment agency with which they thought she had registered, and sent what the agency called "hordes" of reporters to harass them. Only on the Saturday immediately before publication, did they contact the authorities.
The Surrey files have been edited to withhold the names of the journalists, two of whom are currently under criminal investigation by the Metropolitan police's Operation Weeting. What Surrey police do describe, however, is the way they first learned of interference in their investigation.
In mid-April 2002, an employment agency in the north of England, which had no involvement whatever with Dowler, rang to complain. Staff arrived for work "to find hordes of reporters from the News of the World waiting". The firm said: "We have had a News of the World reporter harassing us today. He says that our agency has recruited Milly as an employee, demanding to know what we know and saying he is working in full co-operation with the police." However, the Surrey report says "the NoW reporter's assertion that he was working with the police was untrue".
The previous day, someone also had rung the agency pretending to be Milly's mother. The files show a NoW reporter subsequently claimed to police that the agency had admitted the 13-year-old Dowler was registered for employment with them. This claim also proved untrue.
On 13 April, the police heard from the NoW directly. A journalist demanded "to be put in touch with a senior police officer". He claimed "he had what could be significant information". The journalist disclosed that "the recruitment agency had telephoned the mobile phone number of Milly Dowler [and left a voicemail message] with an offer of work".
Police at first thought this story of a voicemail must be the work of a hoaxer. They eventually discovered that it was "a pure coincidence … of no evidential value". The agency had merely rung the wrong number by mistake, and left a message for "Nana", which the reporters had persuaded themselves sounded like "Amanda", Milly's proper name.
But the News of the World refused to accept its story had been knocked down. One reporter insisted that it could not be a hoax because "the NoW had got Milly's mobile phone number and pin from school children".
The NoW had five reporters working on the story, it told police, and it printed a story in its first edition on 14 April 2002 claiming police were "intrigued" by the alleged new lead. It quoted verbatim from three voicemails, and gave the impression they had been retrieved by the police themselves. After protests from Surrey police, the story was modified in later editions to suggest that the employment agency message was merely a hoax.
The paper wrote detailing further voicemail messages it possessed, and demanding police supply more information.
One reporter said "what the Surrey police press officer was telling him was not true and was inconceivable … the NoW was moving its investigation to the north of England, that Milly had been there in person and that she had applied for a job in a factory. The unidentified reporter whose name has been redacted said that the NoW "know this 110% – we are absolutely certain".
But according to the newly released report, the NoW's "110%" certainty was simply based on illegal interceptions, a misunderstanding of the facts, and an apparent confidence that police would not dare take action against it for phone hacking.
The former News of the World journalist, Neville Thurlbeck, told Channel 4 News last week that he had been acting as news editor at the time of the hunt for Dowler. But he said he had not been aware that her voicemails had been hacked by the paper.
The Surrey police flatly contradict the suggestion that they could have been the source of the Dowler voicemails which were published in the News of the World at the time, a claim made both by Thurlbeck and by Tom Crone, the NOW's former lawyer, in his evidence to the committee. They say: "The NoW obtained that information by accessing Milly Dowler's voicemail". No one at Surrey police was aware of its existence until told by the NoW journalists.
The committee chairman, Conservative MP John Whittingdale, told Sky News the paper "appears as if they may have actually interfered or impeded the police in their investigations".
Conservative committee member Damian Collins said: "Of all of the documents and evidence that have been produced by our phone-hacking inquiry, this is the most sickening and exposes the black hearts of those involved in perpetrating and covering up this scandal."
Tom Watson, the former Labour minister who was himself put under surveillance by the News of the World, has tweeted that the Surrey police revelations were "utterly stomach-churning".
His Labour colleague Paul Farrelly, said: "Apart from the immorality of hacking into Milly Dowler's phone, the letter shows the sheer nerve of the News of the World in feeling able to bully and harangue the police ... This was a newspaper clearly intoxicated with the arrogance of its own power."
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