London:

Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid tapped Prince Harry’s landline and accessed messages on his late mother, Princess Diana’s pager, the royal family’s legal team told London’s High Court on Thursday.

Harry, the youngest son of King Charles and the late Princess Diana, and more than 40 others are suing News Group News (NGN), accusing its journalists and private investigators of working at its tabloids, The Sun and the now-defunct News conduct illegal activities. world, from the mid-1990s to 2016.

In a ruling last July, Judge Timothy Fancourt said Harry could take his allegations of unlawful gathering of information to court, but his allegations of decades-old phone hacking Dismissed because it was filed too late.

At a High Court hearing on Thursday, Harry’s lawyers sought to amend his lawsuit in light of the ruling and add other new charges.

These include further claims that The Sun ordered private investigators to target his then-girlfriend, now-wife Meghan, in 2016, as well as allegations of widespread wiretapping of his phones.

“Plaintiff also asserts claims and seeks relief for landline telephone interception, cordless telephone and analog mobile telephone interception, and landline voicemail interception, which is distinct from telephone wiretapping,” his attorneys said in a statement. Court documents.

The statement also included allegations related to Diana that she was “closely monitored and her phone calls were unlawfully intercepted by (NGN), which was known to its editors and senior managers”.

NGN objected to the addition of what it called a “substantial number of new charges” for a number of reasons, including that they were brought too late, lacked evidence and were related to already-dismissed phone-hacking claims.

“They cover a time period beyond the scope of the current complaint and general statement of case, and in many cases involve allegations that have been known for as long as 30 years,” NGN’s attorneys said in court documents.

In 2011, NGN apologized for widespread phone hacking by News of the World journalists, and Murdoch closed the News of the World after public outcry. NGN has since settled more than 1,300 claims, but the organization has always denied any allegations of wrongdoing by Sun employees.

Lawyers for Harry and other plaintiffs told the court on Wednesday that Murdoch and other executives were involved in covering up widespread misconduct by providing false evidence to courts, parliament and public inquiries.

NGN said some claimants were simply using the lawsuit, which is expected to go to trial in January, as a means to attack the tabloid media, and that the allegations against its current and former staff were a “vulgar and cynical attack on their integrity”.

Since resigning from royal duties in 2020 and moving to California, Prince Harry has turned his attention to battling the British media, which he says has intruded into his private life since he was a child and spread lies about him and those close to him.

In December he won a lawsuit against the Mirror Group newspaper over allegations of phone hacking and illegal activity, with the judge agreeing that senior figures had been informed of what had happened.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)