©Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Britain’s Prince Harry attends the 2023 WellChild Awards ceremony in London, Britain, September 7, 2023. REUTERS/Toby Melville
By Michael Holden and Sam Tobin
LONDON (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids intercepted Prince Harry’s landlines and accessed pager messages from his late mother, Princess Diana, the British royal’s legal team told the High Court in London on Thursday. London.
Harry, the youngest son of King Charles and the late Princess Diana, and more than 40 others are suing News Group Newspapers (NGN) over allegations of illegal activity by journalists and private investigators at its tabloids, the Sun and the now defunct News of. the world, from the mid-1990s to 2016.
In a ruling last July, Judge Timothy Fancourt said Harry could have taken his illegal intelligence gathering charges to trial, but his decades-old computer hacking charges were dismissed because they were dismissed too late.
At a High Court hearing on Thursday, Harry’s lawyers sought to amend his case in light of that ruling and add more new charges.
These include further claims that the Sun ordered private investigators to target his then-girlfriend and now-wife Meghan in 2016, and allegations of widespread wiretapping of his calls.
“The appellant further files a complaint and requests relief in relation to the interception of landline calls, the interception of calls from cordless telephones and analog mobile calls, as well as the interception of landline voice messages, as distinct from the phone hacking,” his lawyers said in court documents.
The indictment also includes allegations related to Diana “being under close surveillance and having her calls illegally intercepted by (NGN), which her editors and senior managers were aware of.”
NGN opposes the addition of what it calls a “huge number of new charges” for numerous reasons, including that they were brought too late, lacked evidence and related to phone hacking charges that had already been dismissed.
“They cover periods of time that fall outside the scope of the current pleadings and general pleadings, and in many cases relate to allegations that have been well publicized for as many as 30 years,” NGN lawyers said in court documents .
NGN lawyer Anthony Hudson (NYSE:) also said it was “unlikely” Harry’s case would be heard at a trial due to begin in January next year if his new charges were included.
In 2011, NGN apologized for widespread phone attacks by journalists at the News of the World, which Murdoch shut down following a public backlash. NGN has since resolved more than 1,300 claims, but the group has consistently rejected allegations of any wrongdoing by Sun staff.
Lawyers for Harry and the other claimants told the court on Wednesday that Murdoch and other senior leaders were involved in the cover-up of widespread wrongdoing and had given false evidence to the courts, parliament and a public inquiry.
NGN claims that some claimants are simply using the lawsuits as a means to attack the tabloid press and that the allegations against its current and former staff were “a scurrilous and cynical attack on their integrity”.
Since stepping down from royal duties in 2020 to move to California, Harry has focused his attention on battling the British press who he says has been intruding into his private life since he was a child, spreading lies about him and on the people close to him.
In December he won a case against the Mirror Group Newspaper over allegations of phone hacking and illegal activity, with the judge agreeing that senior figures were aware of what was happening.