LONDON: Britain’s top police chief resigned and the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper business was arrested on Sunday over a phone-hacking scandal that has rocked pillars of the establishment.
Paul Stephenson, London’s police commissioner, quit in the face of allegations that police officers had accepted money from Murdoch’s News of the World paper and not done enough to investigate phone-hacking charges.
Stephenson said he did not want questions about his leadership to undermine the enormous challenge confronting the police in providing security for the Olympic Games in London next year.
“I had no knowledge of the extent of this disgraceful practice (of phone-hacking) and the repugnant nature of the selection of victims that is now emerging,” Stephenson said in a televised statement.
Stephenson’s resignation and the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, one of Murdoch’s top lieutenants, were the latest twists in a scandal that has tainted police and politicians and shaken the tycoon’s global media empire.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 18th, 2011.
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