LONDON — Scotland Yard, still reeling from the alleged police role in Britain’s phone hacking scandal, was asked Thursday to investigate another explosive claim: that journalists bribed officers to locate people by tracking their cellphone signals.
The practice is known as “pinging” because of the way cellphone signals bounce off relay towers as they try to find reception.
Jenny Jones, a member of the board that oversees the Metropolitan Police Authority, cited claims that reporters at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid paid off corrupt police officers to trace cellphones.
The allegation was made by the late Sean Hoare, a former News of the World reporter who spoke to the New York Times about skullduggery at the tabloid. Hoare — who was fired in 2005 — said officers were paid nearly $500 (300 pounds) per trace. The paper cited a second unnamed former News of the World journalist as corroborating Hoare’s claim.
Hoare, 47, was found dead Monday at his home near London; police say the death is not suspicious.
Jones asked Scotland Yard to examine the records of all cases in which police accessed phone-tracking data “to ensure those were valid requests.” In an interview with The Associated Press, Jones said that going through the cellphone tracing requests “is a relatively simple way of finding corrupt officers” given that it would be clear who was being targeted and when.
“The information is there, and you can check,” she said.
Pinging joins a host of alleged media misdeeds being put under the microscope as police, politicians, and the public weigh allegations that journalists at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World engaged in years of lawless behavior to get scoops.
British politicians have felt the heat too. Prime Minister David Cameron’s former communications director — Murdoch newspapers veteran Andy Coulson — came under fresh scrutiny Thursday after it was reported that he did not have a top-level security clearance, which spared him from the most stringent type of vetting.
And there was further intrigue injected into the scandal after Britain’s Cabinet Office released correspondence showing that a senior official believed he had had his phone broken into as recently as last year— well after Coulson and his former News of the World colleagues insisted the practice was dead and buried.
Allegations of illegal behavior at the News of the World have received feverish attention since a July 4 report alleged that someone at the tabloid hacked the phone of 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler in 2002 while police were still searching for her.
