Three leading mobile phone companies have told the Guardian that they have discovered a total of more than 100 customers whose voicemail was accessed by the private investigator and the journalist at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.
This directly contradicts the official version of events promoted by the newspaper and police that there were "only a handful" of victims in the scandal. And it puts new pressure on David Cameron's media adviser, Andy Coulson, who edited the paper at the time of the illegal activity and who has said repeatedly that he does not recall any of his journalists being involved in hacking anyone's voicemail messages.
The three phone companies – Orange, O2 and Vodafone – say they identified the customers three years ago, after Scotland Yard passed them phone numbers which had been used by the News of the World's private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, and the paper's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, when they called out to listen to the voicemail of their targets.
Searching through their records, the companies say they then traced customers whose voicemail had been accessed from those numbers. O2 says it found "about 40" whose voicemail had been successfully accessed; Vodafone says it found a similar number whose voicemail had been "intercepted"; and Orange says it found 45 customers whose voicemail had been dialled by Mulcaire or Goodman.
Scotland Yard has never revealed this information from the phone companies. The officer who led the inquiry, Andy Hayman, said there had been "only a handful" of victims, a claim echoed by senior officers in media briefings. The News of the World and Press Complaints Commission have taken the same line.
The true number of victims is likely to be much higher: the phone companies keep call data for only 12 months, but Mulcaire was involved in surveillance for the News of the World for nine years. Two other companies – T-Mobile and Three – say police never contacted them to ask them to check their records.
Separately, Scotland Yard has answered a long-delayed Freedom of Information request from the Guardian, conceding that in the material seized from Mulcaire and Goodman police found pin codes, which are used for accessing voicemail messages, belonging to 91 different people. In public statements about the case, police have never previously disclosed this.
News of the World sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, say a group of journalists at the paper were fully aware of Mulcaire and other investigators being involved in illegal surveillance. They say Mulcaire was highly prized for his skills and that he was at the heart of the paper's investigations unit and was a guest at dinners and parties.
Senior figures from the paper, however, insist that they knew nothing of this. Coulson told the media select committee he had never met Mulcaire nor even heard his name during his six years at the paper. The paper's legal adviser, Tom Crone, also said he had never heard of Mulcaire until he was arrested in August 2006.
The revelation of more than 100 new victims is the latest in a sequence of disclosures which have undermined the official story, presented in January 2007 at the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire. This claimed that there were only eight victims of Mulcaire's phone-hacking, and that Goodman was the only journalist involved.
The News of the World said he was a "rogue reporter" who had tricked them into paying Mulcaire to hack royal messages and that it had no knowledge of Mulcaire hacking anyone's phone.
However, the Guardian revealed last July that Scotland Yard had been compelled by a court order to hand over some of the material it seized from Mulcaire's office. This revealed the names of two other News of the World journalists involved in handling intercepted voicemail messages and several other victims. The paper suppressed the information by paying £1m in costs and damages to Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers Association and two others whose legal action disclosed the material.
Since then it has emerged that police knew at the time of the trial, but did not disclose, a series of other suspected victims in government, the police, the military and the royal household. The few who have now been identified are Tessa Jowell, whose voicemail was intercepted when she was secretary of state for media; Boris Johnson, when he was opposition spokesman on higher education; Prince William and Prince Harry; and Coulson himself. The interception of voicemail is an imprisonable offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
It has also emerged that the eight victims named in court were chosen as a sample to prevent the case becoming unmanageable, and that Scotland Yard simply did not investigate the mass of paperwork, computer records and tapes seized from Mulcaire and Goodman. A small sample of this evidence seen by the Guardian shows that among those who were targeted by Mulcaire were the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott, George Michael, Jade Goody, Prince William's partner, Kate Middleton, Princess Michael of Kent and Iorworth Hoare, a rapist who won the lottery. Police did not attempt to discover whether Mulcaire had used illegal methods to research these and numerous other people who are named in the seized material.
The phone companies have also revealed more evidence that Scotland Yard breached its agreement with the director of public prosecutions that it would warn "all potential victims". The Guardian has already traced victims who were never warned, even though police had tapes or transcripts of their intercepted messages. Now, Orange says it warned none of its victims and that the police never asked it to; Vodafone says it warned customers "as appropriate". Only O2 says that all of its victims have been contacted.
This includes a former Coronation Street actor who says that in the summer of 2006 she was aware of somebody she suspected was acting on behalf of the News of the World making fake calls, trying to obtain her address by pretending to be Parcelforce or a chauffeur sent to drive her to work. Shortly afterwards, following the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire, O2 contacted her to advise her to change the pin code on her mobile phone because of attempts to access her voicemail.
Since the Guardian's story last July, Scotland Yard has analysed the material seized from Mulcaire and created a database that summarises the information he held on each of numerous targets. However, the Yard has refused to publicise this and continues to refuse to reveal the number of people named in the material and the number for whom Mulcaire had mobile phone numbers and tape recordings of messages.