A journalist at the tabloid The Sun was arrested Friday on suspicion of making illegal payments to police officers

From:
New York Times
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON — A journalist at the tabloid The Sun was arrested Friday on suspicion of making illegal payments to police officers, a sign that a scandal has spread beyond The News of the World to other papers in Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire.

The suspect, a 48-year-old man, is the sixth person to be arrested in Scotland Yard’s investigation into illegal payoffs by newspapers to police officers in the wake of the phone hacking scandal at The News of the World. He was arrested outside London “in connection with allegations of corruption,” the police said, and taken to a police station in southwest London for questioning.

The police would not identify the man, but News International, the British newspaper arm of Mr. Murdoch’s media conglomerate, said in a statement that he was a News International employee, and people at the company have identified him as Jamie Pyatt, a senior journalist at The Sun, the Murdoch-owned tabloid that is the most popular daily newspaper in Britain.

The arrest suggests that payoffs to the police may have extended beyond The News of the World, which was closed by Mr. Murdoch in July in an effort to contain the scandal, to other parts of the Murdoch newspaper stable. Mr. Pyatt is the first journalist not employed by The News of the World to be arrested in connection with the police corruption case; he has been at The Sun for more than 20 years and has never worked at The News of the World.

In 2006, Mr. Pyatt, the newspaper’s district editor, won the Scoop of the Year prize at the British Press Awards for his report on how Prince Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles, attended a costume party dressed as a Nazi.

There is increasing evidence that The Sun might also have been involved in phone hacking, a technique used to illegally intercept voice mail messages. Documents in the case of Guy Pelly, who sued News International this year when it became clear that his phone might have been hacked, show that information illegally obtained by The News of the World was passed to The Sun “from time to time.”

Scotland Yard opened the investigation into police payoffs by journalists, known as Operation Elveden, this summer after e-mails turned over to the police by News International showed that its journalists might have paid more than $200,000 to police officers in exchange for news tips, including information about the movements of members of the royal family.

Those arrested in the Elveden case so far include Andy Coulson, former editor of The News of the World and the former chief spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron; and Rebekah Brooks, who also worked as the editor of The News of the World and is a former chief executive of News International.

Operation Elveden is running alongside the phone hacking investigation, known as Operation Weeting, which has produced 16 arrests so far.

No charges have yet been brought in either inquiry; typically, suspects are questioned, released and asked to present themselves to the police for possible criminal charges at a later date.

Meanwhile, News International announced Friday that it had set up what it called a “speedy, cost-effective alternative to litigation” that would allow phone hacking victims to apply for swift out-of-court settlements through a company Web site. The purpose of the program, called the Voicemail Interception Compensation Scheme, is to “process good claims quickly to an award of compensation, not to get bogged down in complex legal arguments and speculative requests for disclosure of documents,” the company says on the site.

People claiming to be victims and wanting compensation are asked to fill out and submit electronic forms detailing their claims.

News International has already set aside more than $30 million to pay phone hacking victims; this move is intended to contain its legal costs as it deals with an increasing number of claims.

Earlier this week, the police admitted that as many as 5,795 people might have been victims of The News of the World’s phone hacking. This summer, they said the figure was 3,870.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

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