Former Chief of News International Rebekah Brooks Charged with Phone-Hacking Case

Former Chief of News International Rebekah Brooks Charged with Phone-Hacking Case

Rebekah Brooks, the former Chief of News International and confidante of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, is to be charged with obstructing justice in the phone-hacking scandal that has stunned Britain.

Prosecutors announced on Tuesday that Brooks would be charged with three counts of "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice," all of them resulting from her alleged attempts to remove or conceal evidence in relation  to the police probe on phone hacking and corruption at the News of the World and the Sun tabloids.

So far, the charges are the most serious to be filed as a result of the thorough investigation, and they represent a shocking reversal of fortune for Brooks, once one of Britain's most influential women, who managed all of Murdoch's newspapers in this country.

In addition, Brooks' husband, Charlie, is to be charged with two counts of obstruction of justice.

Days after the phone-hacking scandal broke out in July, a guard at the London apartment building where the Brooks maintain a flat discovered a laptop computer and various documents stuffed into a garbage bag and thrown into a trash can. The guard handed the evidences over to the police, from whom Charlie Brooks tried unsuccessfully to retrieve them, saying he had thrown them out by mistake.

Besides Rebekah and husband Charlie Brooks, prosecutors would also press charges of obstructing justice against four other people, including Rebekah Brooks' personal assistant and her chauffeur.

The charges against all six suspects stemmed from their actions two weeks after the hacking scandal exploded last summer amid allegations that the News of the World had illegally tapped into the voicemails of a kidnapped teenager who was later found slain.

In one of the highlighted charges, Brooks and her assistant, Cheryl Carter, are alleged to have tried removing seven boxes of material from the archive of News International, the British subsidiary of Murdoch's giant News Corp.

Posted by James Fried on Wednesday May 16 2012, 4:39 AM EDT. Ref: Google. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, World. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0