LONDON (AP) – Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper company has agreed to pay damages to a former intelligence officer whose computer was hacked by detectives working for Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid, lawyers said Friday.
Ian Hurst, who ran agents inside the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, sued Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers after learning from a BBC news report in 2011 that his emails had been hacked.
Hurst’s lawyer, Jeremy Reed, said at the High Court in London that News Group acknowledged the agent’s emails had been intercepted “routinely and intensively” over several months in 2006.
Reed said when he found out, Hurst “feared for the safety of many of the people with whom he had been in contact,” who included people in the witness protection program.
News Group lawyer Anthony Hudson said the company “accepts that such activity happened, accepts that it should never have happened, and has undertaken to the court that it will never happen again.”