Greg Miskiw, head of news at tabloid paper, said voicemails of former England football captain were accessed ‘routinely, all the time, over and over again’
The former England captain David Beckham’s phone was hacked by News of the World journalists, the paper’s former head of news has admitted for the first time.
In an interview with Channel 4 News on Friday, Greg Miskiw said Beckham’s voicemails were accessed “routinely, all the time, over and over again”.
Miskiw also spoke of his regret at the hacking of murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone and described the culture at the now-defunct newspaper – saying that failure to “get the story” would soon be followed by the sack.
And he said that hacking had gone on at other newspapers, which had thus far not been brought to light. He made similar revelations in an exclusive essay with the Byline Project.
“We hacked David Beckham’s phones routinely, all the time, over and over again,” Miskiw said.
But he added that one of the paper’s most high profile stories – when it claimed that Beckham had had an affair with his assistant, Rebecca Loos, a claim he has always denied – had not come from hacking Beckham’s phone.
“The [Rebecca Loos] story, we had to track all these phones. From recollection, I don’t think we got anything of any significance from doing Beckham’s phones [for it],” he said.
Beckham has long believed that he was a victim of phone hacking and, in 2013, News Corporation, which owned the News of the World, settled a case with the former footballer’s father out of court. But no one connected to the company had hitherto publicly admitted that Beckham’s phones were hacked.
Miskiw, nicknamed the “prince of darkness” because of his connection to the so-called dark arts, said he was “devastated” when he heard that his colleagues had hacked Milly Dowler’s phone.
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