London's Metropolitan Police said it added 15 officers and staff to its investigation into phone- hacking by journalists at News Corp. (NWSA)'s now defunct News of the World tabloid.
It means 60 people now work on the probe, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers said today in an e-mailed statement. The police opened a new investigation into the interception of phone messages in January, four years after the paper's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, was jailed for conspiring to tap phones.
"Following a surge of enquiries and requests for assistance from the public and solicitors, there has been a significant increase in the workload of Operation Weeting," Akers said. "If the demand decreases, I will release officers back to other duties."
The move came 12 hours after Parliament's Home Affairs Committee said it noted with "alarm" that only 170 potential hacking victims, out of almost 13,000 possible targets, had been informed their phone messages may have been accessed.
"At this rate it would be at least a decade before everyone was informed," the panel wrote in their report. "This timeframe is clearly absurd, but it seems to us to underline the need for more resources to be made available."
Lawmakers yesterday took evidence from Commissioner Paul Stephenson and Assistant Commissioner John Yates, both of whom announced their resignations this week amid the scandal.
Police in 2009 concluded there were no grounds to reopen the inquiry into phone-hacking at the News of the World after Yates spent eight hours reviewing the evidence. Operation Weeting began on Jan. 26, after new evidence that emerged in a civil case involving the actress Sienna Miller was passed to the police.
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To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net
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