As hackgate lumbers on and a steady flow of revelations emerge what has happened with the Daniel Morgan inquiry.
The Daniel Morgan Murder: An Unsolved Mystery of the Murdoch Hacking Scandal
On Friday, Britain’s home secretary opened a judge-led public inquiry into the brutal and mysterious 1987 slaying of Daniel Morgan. Peter Jukes talks to Alastair Morgan, who hopes the decades-long cover-up of his brother’s death may finally be revealed.
It is Britain’s biggest unsolved murder, and described by a senior police officer as “the pivotal crime of the times.”
It
plunges into the heart of what former prime minister Gordon Brown
called the “criminal-media nexus” exposed by the hacking and bribes
scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid titles. Only on
this occasion the crimes went well beyond privacy intrusion and corrupt
payments, to a brutal killing.
On Friday, home secretary Theresa May announced
a judge-led public inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, who was
found with an axe embedded in his head in a South London car park in
1987. The panel of experts will examine not only the police corruption
that sabotaged five successive police investigations and caused the
subsequent murder trial to collapse, but also the “connections between
private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media and corruption involved in the linkages between them.”
Daniel
Morgan ran a successful private investigations agency, Southern
Investigations, with Jonathan Rees in the 1980s. However, as explained
to The Daily Beast by his brother Alastair, Daniel had become
suspicious of his business partner and concerned about police
corruption. He was preparing to expose local police officers to the
now-shuttered News of the World according to another colleague. But after a meeting with Rees, Daniel was murdered.
One
of the officers to first investigate the murder, Sid Fillery, left the
police and took over Daniel’s role at Southern Investigations. Over the
next two decades Fillery and Rees formed one of the most prolific
private detective agencies working for the British press, and
established what the investigative journalists Nick Davies and Vikram
Dodd described as an “empire of corruption.”
According to the Guardian they provided material, mainly for News of the World,
through a variety of illegal means, including paying police officers for
confidential records, obtaining phone records, care registration
details, banks account details, and allegedly using ‘Trojan Horse’
emails to hack computers. According to two sources, the firm
“commissioned burglaries to obtain material for journalists.”
A
senior police source described the Morgan murder and the Rees-Fillery
partnership as the origin of the illegal practices exposed by the
hacking scandal. “Their relationship with News of the World,” the source said “was without question the maternity ward where the Dark Arts were born.”
Meanwhile
Southern Investigations was still subject to no less than five police
investigations at a cost of some $50 million. The police planted an
undercover officer in the agency, and had the offices bugged. However,
most of the material has never been released.
“Morgan and his partner’s relationship with News of the World was without question the maternity ward where the Dark Arts were born.”
Further police investigations were deliberately sabotaged by employees of News of the World.
David Cook, who led two of inquiries, had his phone hacked by the
tabloid, his house watched, and his family followed. As his former wife
and police officer Jacqui Hames explained to the Leveson Inquiry Press
ethics last year, the surveillance was due to “collusion between people at News of the World and those suspected of the murder.”
When confronted about the surveillance, then editor of News of the World
Rebekah Brooks claimed it was a legitimate investigation to see if Cook
and Hames were ‘having an affair’—though they had children and had been
married for years.
Rees
was sentenced for seven years over a separate crime in 2000, but was
promptly rehired upon his release by Andy Coulson—an editor who had
taken over from Brooks as editor of News of the World, and would soon move over to become Prime Minister David Cameron’s press supremo.
According
to Alastair Morgan, the terms of reference of the new inquiry have been
under discussion for months. “It was only the hacking scandal and the
Leveson Inquiry which brought this back into the spotlight,” he told The
Daily Beast. Modelled on the recent Hillsborough Panel, which last year revealed police misconduct and press lies about the death of 96 Liverpool supporters at a football stadium in the 1989,
Alastair hopes the inquiry will at least expose the cover-up, although—
because of the “legal nightmares of previous investigations”— he
doubted those behind the murder would ever be brought to justice.
David Cook, who ran two of the murder inquiries, compared
the Morgan case to another notorious South London murder, the racist
killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1996, which also took
decades to come to justice “but instead of race being the issue, this time it is about corruption.”
“This whole saga could best be described as an iceberg,” Cook told the
Daily Beast. “What you see on the surface is nothing to what lies
underneath.”
Campaigning
Labour MP Tom Watson, a key figure in exposing the phone hacking
scandal through Parliament, believes that the new inquiry—with power to
examine all the police documents going back to 1987—could prove
historic. “By the end of this process we should know more about a very
opaque period in British history when corrupt police, private
investigators, and tabloid journalists worked together,” he said. Watson
told The Daily Beast he was particularly interested in what happened to
the material garnered in the late 1990s concerning “the relationship
between Southern Investigations and News of the World.” He hoped there
will be a full investigation of what senior officers really knew back
then.
Above
all, however, Watson wanted to pay tribute to the Morgan family for
their often lonely and unheard campaign. Two decades ago Alastair Morgan
made solemn promise to his dead brother that he “would not rest” until
the corruption was exposed. As the public inquiry gets under away later
this year, his pledge may at last be honoured.
Curtesy of http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/10/the-daniel-morgan-murder-an-unsolved-mystery-of-the-murdoch-hacking-scandal.html
Curtesy of http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/10/the-daniel-morgan-murder-an-unsolved-mystery-of-the-murdoch-hacking-scandal.html
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