England football manager’s phone targeted over 4 years, phone-hacking trial hears
England manager’s sex life exposed after hacking
repeatedly hacked into the voicemail of Sven-Goran Eriksson over a four-year period as it exposed his sex life and then set him up for a sting by its “fake sheikh” reporter, Mazher Mahmood, an Old Bailey central criminal court jury heard on Wednesday.
At the climax of the campaign, the court was told, the then England football manager announced that he would resign, and the newspaper prominently claimed the credit for his fall.
In 2004, Greg Miskiw, a news editor, tasked the specialist hacker Glenn Mulcaire to hack Eriksson, the prosecution said. This time, the notes that were shown to the jury included the home address and phone number of Faria Alam, a secretary at the Football Association.
then published a sequence of stories exposing her relationship with Eriksson () and with a senior FA executive (). The stories were among those which won the award for Newspaper of the Year 2004-5, the court heard.
Two years later, Mulcaire returned to Eriksson’s phone, repeatedly calling into his number in January 2006, allegedly listening to his private messages. On January 22, published a series of embarrassing comments which Eriksson had made to the paper’s undercover reporter Mahmood, under the headline .
Mulcaire’s phone records suggest that he continued to hack the England manager’s phone until Eriksson announced that he would resign, the prosecution told the jury.
The prosecution said the targeting of Eriksson dated back to 2002. Notes written by Mulcaire suggest that Eriksson was first hacked in 2002 on four occasions on the instructions of two senior executives at : Miskiw and the then news editor, Neville Thurlbeck.
Mulcaire’s notes of the time, which are scrawled by hand and intersected by arrow-marks and doodles, included Eriksson’s name and mobile phone number and the personal details of an unrelated pole-dancer from Brighton who had also been targeted.
Mulcaire, Miskiw and Thurlbeck have all pleaded guilty to charges of phone hacking. During the targeting of Eriksson’s phone, the jury has been told, the paper was edited by Rebekah Brooks in 2002. In 2004 and 2006, the editor was Andy Coulson. Brooks and Coulson have denied conspiring to intercept communications.
Earlier, the jury heard that a team of reporters from had descended on a recruitment agency in Telford in April 2002 when a hacked voicemail led Thurlbeck to believe that the agency had given work to the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
The evidence included allegations that a reporter had falsely claimed to be working with the police and that somebody had tried to get information from the agency by pretending to be Milly’s mother.
The court heard that one of the reporters who was sent to Telford, Vanessa Altin, had been working undercover in the Sugar Lounge club in Manchester, looking for stories about Man United players who drank there, when Thurlbeck told her he believed the recruitment agency had found Milly work at an Epson factory in Ironbridge.
In a statement to police, Altin said she had thought this was a “pointless waste of time”. Nevertheless, she told police, Thurlbeck had sent her and six others to pursue the story.
On Monday, the jury heard that after his reporters had returned empty-handed from Telford, Thurlbeck had called Surrey police, who were investigating Milly Dowler’s disappearance, and told them that the recruitment agency had confirmed that they had given work to the missing girl.
The paper’s crime reporter, Ricky Sutton had told a Surrey police press officer that he was “100 per cent certain” the story was true.
The trial continues.
