Officers involved with Operation Weeting, Scotland Yard’s phone hacking enquiry, revealed the numbers on Saturday, with Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers telling The Times newspaper: "We are confident we have personally contacted all the people who have been hacked or are likely to have been hacked."
According to the Guardian, the Metropolitan Police now believe that the “false hope” moment given to Bob and Sue Dowler, parents of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, may not have been caused by journalists working for the News of the World deleting phone messages.
"It is understood that while News of the World reporters probably were responsible for deleting some of the missing girl's messages, police have concluded that they were not responsible for the particular deletion which caused her family to have false hope that she was alive," said the report.
Detectives told Dowler's parents in April that journalists from the newspaper had deleted messages on Milly's phone.
"This means the paper's journalists would have inadvertently caused some voicemails to be deleted after they began listening to them, but police found that some messages had also been deleted before the News of the World began hacking into her voicemail," said the Guardian.
In response, Mark Lewis, the lawyer representing the Dowlers, released a statement saying that his clients did not know if it was Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator working for the News of the World, or journalists that triggered the deletion.
The statement read:
“What is known is that the deletions were not automatically triggered by Milly. The mobile telephone company’s records show that Milly’s last call on her own phone was made on Wednesday 20 March 2002. Automatic deletion triggered by Milly would have happened (at the latest) by Saturday 23 March 2002. The deletions that gave false hope to the Dowler family happened after that date and therefore were caused by someone else accessing her voicemail.”Lewis said it remained unchallenged that the News of the World listened to Milly Dowler’s voicemail and "eavesdropped on deeply personal messages which were being left for her by her distraught friends".
Police originally identified 5795 potential victims from material collected from Mulcaire’s notebooks. The private investigator was jailed for phone hacking in 2007.
In addition to the 800 victims, a further 1,200 people have been contacted but the police do no believe their phones were hacked.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: "Operation Weeting has been in contact with or been contacted by 2,037 people, of which in the region of 803 are 'victims', whose names have appeared in the material."
The phone hacking scandal led to the closure of the News of the World in July after 168 years.
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Source: Huff
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