Phone hacking scandal: Andy Coulson to face fresh trial on bribery charges

London: Former News of the World editor Andy Coulson and the paper’s former royal reporter Clive Goodman will face a retrial on charges stemming from the phone hacking case.

British prosecutors have accused them of paying police officers to obtain royal phone directories so they could hack into the mobile phones of royal aides for stories.

The retrial was announced Monday at the start of a sentencing hearing for Coulson, who was convicted last week of other phone hacking charges.

Prosecutor Andrew Edis told the court that the Crown Prosecution Service “has taken the position to proceed with the retrial.”

The jury in that case failed to reach a decision on two of the charges against Coulson — a former top aide to Prime Minister David Cameron — and Goodman, who pleaded guilty to earlier phone hacking charges in 2006.

Coulson’s lawyers will present “mitigation arguments” in court this week before his sentence on hacking charges is announced on Friday. He faces up to two years in prison.

Ex-editor Rebekah Brooks, the former chief of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper division, and others were cleared of the hacking charges after an eight-month trial that exposed widespread wrongdoing at the News of the World.

Journalists there were found to have intercepted phone messages of celebrities, crime victims and politicians.

The resulting furor led Murdoch to shut down the 168-year-old newspaper. His company has since made a number of payments to hacking victims.

AP