Plot thickens: NOTW phone hacking whistleblower dead

The News of the World imbroglio just got more mysterious. Sean Hoare, the former reporter of the now-wound up tabloid who was the first journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was in the know of telephone hacking by his staff, has been found dead. In a damning revelation to the New York Times, he had also said that Coulson actively encouraged his staff to intercept the phone calls of celebrities. Hoare, who was dismissed from the tabloid for drugs problems, had asserted that Coulson had directed him to tap phones. According to a report in the Guardian , he was found dead in his Watford home. “The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing,” the newspaper said quoting police sources. [caption id=“attachment_43606” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious, says the Guardian. Reuters”] [/caption] According to the Guardian, Hoare, a one-time close friend of Coulson’s, had told the New York Times the two men first worked together at the Sun, where, Hoare said, he played tape recordings of hacked messages for Coulson. At the News of the World, Hoare said he continued to inform Coulson of his activities. Coulson “actively encouraged me to do it,” he said. Later, speaking to the BBC, Hoare said Coulson’s insistence that he didn’t know about the practice was “a lie, it is simply a lie”. In September last year, the journalist was interviewed by the police after claiming that the former Tory communications chief asked him to hack into phones when he was editor of the paper. Hoare emerged back into the spotlight last week, after he told the New York Times that reporters at the News of the World were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals in exchange for payments to police officers. He said journalists were able to use a technique called ‘pinging’ which measured the distance between mobile handsets and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location. Hoare gave further details about the use of ‘pinging’ to the Guardian last week. He described how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: “Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say ‘right that’s where they are.’” He said: “You’d just go to the news desk and they’d just come back to you. You don’t ask any questions. You’d consider it a job done. The chain of command is one of absolute discipline and what’s why I never bought into, like with Andy saying he wasn’t aware of it and all that. That’s bollocks.”