The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has opened an investigation into whether the phones of victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks and their families were hacked into by media baron Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Law enforcement sources said Thursday the FBI will look into whether employees at Murdoch’s media firm illegally tried to access private calls, voicemail messages or call records of the victims and their relatives after the attacks nearly a decade ago, or looked to bribe police for such information. The FBI started the probe a day after Peter King, a congressman for the New York district where many of the 3,000 victims of the September 11th attacks lived, asked the agency to investigate.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters in Australia Friday the Justice Department has received a number of requests from lawmakers to look into the allegations involving News Corporation, and is “progressing in that regard” through the appropriate law enforcement agencies.
Murdoch’s company has several lucrative news and entertainment outlets in the U.S., including the country’s top business newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, and a major television news outlet, the Fox News Channel.
The FBI involvement is just the latest twist in the widening scandal engulfing Murdoch’s vast media empire. In London on Thursday, the 80-year-old Murdoch and his son, James, at first refused, then agreed to testify before the British parliament next week about the phone-hacking and police bribery scandal that has engulfed their British media operations.
The Murdochs’ agreement to testify came after the head of their British operations, Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of the now-closed News of the World tabloid at the center of the scandal, said she would appear before the panel.
The Murdochs’ decision to testify avoided a potential dispute over whether the parliamentary summons could be enforced against them because they are U.S. citizens — unlike Brooks, who is British.
The skirmishing over next week’s hearing came on a day when British police arrested a ninth suspect in their investigation. He is Neil Wallis, the 60-year-old former executive editor of the News of the World who left the paper in 2009 and is now a public relations executive. Wallis was held on “suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications.”
Wallis was the deputy editor of the newspaper under Andy Coulson from 2003 to 2007. Coulson, the communications director for British Prime Minister David Cameron from 2007 until earlier this year, was arrested in the investigation earlier this month.
Police later acknowledged that Wallis had been employed by them as a part-time consultant on a contract that ended last September. The French news agency said he worked for the police two days a month for a year and was paid $39,000.
The breadth of the scandal has rocked Murdoch operations in Britain, forcing the elder Murdoch to shut the 168-year-old News of the World last week and then abandon his $12-billion bid to acquire full control of British Sky Broadcasting, a satellite television company.
