The Times of London is being sued over email hacking, a lawyer said Friday, April 13 an indication that the scandal over media misdeeds at Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers continues to spread, AP reported.
Lawyer Mark Lewis told AP that his firm had filed suit against the 227-year-old publication over its hacking of police blogger Richard Horton's email account.
"We did lodge papers," Lewis confirmed in an email, adding that the suit was filed on Tuesday.
The Times unmasked Horton as the detective behind the award-winning "NightJack" blog in a controversial 2009 piece which Horton unsuccessfully sued to try to suppress.
According to an account of the lawsuit published in Britain's New Statesman magazine, Horton's lawyer raised the possibility that the detective's Hotmail account had been illegal accessed — an allegation dismissed as "baseless" in 2009 by Times lawyer Alastair Brett.
However, in public statements and in testimony before an official inquiry into media ethics, senior Times managers admitted that one of their reporters had accessed Horton's account.
"'Baseless' was not the best word to use," Brett told the inquiry last month.
Times publisher News International did not immediately return an email or a call Friday.
