BRITIAN: The London police investigation into allegations that a journalist from the London-based News of the World newspaper hacked into the royal family's mobile phone messages broadened last night after suggestions that former UK home secretary David Blunkett, other politicians and Victoria Beckham may also have been among prominent victims of tabloid hacking.
The newspaper's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman (48), was still being questioned by anti-terrorist squad detectives yesterday, almost 36 hours after being arrested in an early-morning raid at his home in Putney, southwest London.
An unnamed 35-year-old from Sutton, south London, was being held at another police station and a 50-year-old, also from Sutton, was released yesterday morning.
Two of Goodman's stories last November appeared to have alerted palace staff that messages were being intercepted. The first concerned a knee injury to Prince William which, it was said, would lead to the postponement of a mountain rescue course he was to attend. The second, a week later, suggested the prince had been lent some broadcasting equipment by a UK TV news channel's then royal correspondent, Tom Bradby, to enable him to edit personal videos and DVDs into "one very posh home movie".
Police were said to be analysing a list of phone numbers to discover who they belonged to and whether they had been intercepted or their messages - though not apparently live conversations - hacked, as part of an investigation that has already lasted several months. The investigation is being conducted by the anti-terrorist squad because of the security implications.
Some tabloid newspaper scoops in recent years appear explicable only if messages were accessed, or confirmed by them. Tabloid journalists are known to have accessed the phone records of Kimberly Fortier, the publisher of the Spectator magazine, after the revelation of her affair with Mr Blunkett.
Although royal officials were privately suggesting that the Prince of Wales and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, had not been victims, it is likely that Prince William has been targeted. Media interest in his love life, particularly his relationship with his former fellow student Kate Middleton, has been intense.
Mobile phone and wire-tapping experts said it was easy to access private messages through compromised personal pin codes.
British intelligence specialist Duncan Campbell said: "It is not hugely difficult. We are dealing with the royal family - these are not the sort of people who instinctively understand this sort of thing, unlike the average 17-year-old. There have recently been similar scandals in Greece, where the prime minister's phone was tapped and in Italy where they tried to do the same thing. It would be straightforward to compromise personal pin codes."
Bradby, now ITV's political editor, said yesterday that details of a meeting he had arranged with Prince William appeared in the News of the World before it had taken place. "I was due to have a private meeting with William and I was pretty surprised to find that not only details of the meeting but what we were going to discuss pitched up in the News of the World the Sunday before ... we both looked at each other and said, 'Well, how on earth did that get out?' and we worked out that only he and I and two people incredibly close to him had actually known about it. Then we started discussing one or two other things that had happened recently ... Basically the answer we came up with was that it must be something like breaking into mobile answering machine messages."