Four Mirror people held in hacking swoop; more focus on CNN's Piers?
The UK phone-hacking scandal has erupted again with Sunday People editor James Scott and his deputy Nick Buckley being arrested in dawn raids. Scott is the first serving newspaper editor to be arrested as part of the scandal.
Morgan: Former lieutenant Tina arrester\d
Also arrested was Tina Weaver, former editor of the Sunday Mirror and a onetime lieutenant to Morgan, himself a former News of the World and Daily Mirror editor who has all along denied involvement in phone hacking.
London's Metropolitan Police said the arrests related to "a suspected conspiracy to intercept telephone voicemails," They said the investigation "mainly concerned" activities at the Sunday Mirror tabloid between 2003 and 2004.
Further to the four arrests, former Daily Mirror editor Richard Wallace was interviewed under caution by detectives investigating alleged phone hacking at Mirror Group, the Guardian reported.
Wallace attended a south London police station and was later released.
He was deputy editor of the Sunday Mirror between 2003 and 2004, before becoming editor of the Daily Mirror until 2012.
Wallace is now a PR adviser to Simon Cowell in the US. He is believed to be flying back to the US on Saturday.
The Sunday Mirror, like the Daily Mirror, is owned by Trinity Mirror , which also owns the Sunday People and a host of regional titles, including the Daily Record and Sunday Mail in Scotland.
Police did not confirm Weaver's name but Trinity Mirror did. Huffington Post said only that a 47-year-old woman was one of the four journalists detained.
Weaver, who was born in 1965, got sympathy notes from fellow journalists.
Neville Thurlbeck, a former News of the World reporter, sent her a Twitter post saying his thoughts were with his former colleague Weaver, whom he said was pregnant and "under severe stress."
CNN host Piers Morgan is a former editor of The Mirror, and of the News of the World, the Rupert Murdoch paper closed when the scandal first broke.
Morgan has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But the US site Bloomberg says "a former Daily Mirror reporter later testified ... that hacking took place on a daily basis among the newspaper’s show-business reporters."
Morgan has previously denied he published any story based on hacking: "I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone."