Around the edge of the current investigations into News International things have kept turning back towards the Name Daniel Morgan, too many small details have kept tieing up, and whispers have slipped back every now and again. Today and tomorrow it appears to be exploding out all over the whole scene.
Afetr yesterdays start to the second section of the Leveson Inquiry, detailed by Brit in his diary yesterday http://www.dailykos.com/... we came to hear the demolition of News Internationals Counter attack, firstly By lord Leveson subtly warning off government ministers who want to interfere in the Inquiry, and the by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, the officer in charge of current investigations, who in a 20 minute deployment of facts and figures, demolished all arguments News International had deployed in the last week or two as to why the Inquiry should be halted.
Todays evidence was thought to be going to be a relatively quiet affair, but instead turned out to be utterly Jaw dropping.
First we had Simon Hughs Deputy Leader of the Liberal democrats tell how his phone records had been stolen, and through this he had been effectively blackmailed into allowing them to write about his sexuality under threat of them writing more negatively if he didn't cooperate. He Suggested that with the lack of investigation that had occurred News International were effectively running the Metropolitan police as if they were a wholy owned susiduary.
The next Witness however was the Cause of Fireworks. Jaqui Hames Is a former police officer andpresenter on A monthly TV program on in the UK called Crimewatch, where police forces appeal for help in unsolved cases, with reconstructions and evidence shown on TV. Hames was Married to Detective Inspector Dave Cook, and He had the job of re-investigating the Murder of Daniel Morgan, a Private Investigator who had been found dead in the Car park of a Kent pub in 1987 with an axe embedded in his head. The Investigation of this Killing has been a running sore in talks of corruption in the Metropolitan police.
The victims Partner in his investigations business, (and prime suspect in his killing) was a man called Johnathan Rees. Rees however from 1993, to the year 2000, when he was thrown into prison for planting cocaine on a woman to help in a custody battle was also working as an Investigator for the News of the World.
Once he was out of Prison, he was once again being paid by the NOTW with Andy Coulson signing off on his work. It is a question whether Rees was used by Coulson once he had gone to work for Cameron
After the investigation had been re-opened she gave the following evidence
Leveson inquiry: NoW accused of colluding with murder suspects | Media | The Guardian
She alleged that former NoW executive Alex Marunchak colluded with suspects who ran the NoW's private detective operations. They put the family under surveillance and targeted their phones for hacking. Brooks, as editor, failed to act when confronted with the evidence in 2003, Hames said, and Marunchak was even subsequently promoted.
After the broadcast, Cook got official intelligence that the suspects planned "to make life difficult for him", and the programme was sent an email suggesting Hames was having an affair with a senior detective. Two vans stationed outside their house were eventuallytraced back to the News of the World.
Police at Scotland Yard did little to protect the couple. Instead, the head of PR at the Met, Dick Fedorcio, spoke to Brooks, who made the "absolutely pathetic" claim that the tabloid had targeted couple because of the alleged affair. "We had by then been married for four years, had been together for 11 years and had two children," Hames said.
So we have A major newspaper attempting to intimidate individual police officers to prevent them investigating its own employees, and the Senior officers at the Met, doing nothing about it. A level of corruption that you think normally only to see in dodgy conspiracy films.
as the comedian Mark Thomas commented
Twitter / @markthomasinfo: Met police so corrupt they ...
Met police so corrupt they are to be shut down completely and relaunched as the Police on Sunday.
Tomorrow we have Tom Watson, standing up to release more details under Parliamentary privilege so thiswill no doubt need updating.
Finally We had the Met and no doubt its PR people having a LOOK OVER HERE IT's A HORSE day. IT turns out that Rebekah was Lent a retired police horse for three years by the met. this kept people distracted for several hours, and now people are starting to look back at the corruption, they are appearing to suggest she mistreated it nowordinarily, you'd think giviing a retired horse to a racehorse trainers wife is quite reasonable. but it occurred while the police are investigating her company.
More Later as things occurr