Sunday Mirror reporter apologised to two victims of his phone hacking

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/12/sunday-mirror-reporter-phone-hacking-dan-evans

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The Sunday Mirror’s former in-house phone hacker met the BBC executive Alan Yentob and actor Lucy Taggart to express his regret at snooping on their voicemails, the high court in London has heard.

Dan Evans revealed that he met the pair to apologise for hacking their phones on a near-daily basis when he worked for the Sunday tabloid between April 2003 and December 2004.

“I’ve had a face-to-face meeting with two of the individuals concerned where I was able to express my deep, deep regret. I would be happy to speak to anybody who wanted to speak to me,” he told the court on Thursday.

Evans, 39, was handed a 10-month suspended prison sentence last July after pleading guilty to intercepting voicemails. The journalist, who left the Sunday Mirror to work for the News of the World in early 2005, said that he met Yentob and Taggart, a former EastEnders actor, on separate occasions.

On meeting Yentob, Evans said it was “a case of meeting the gentleman, being able to look him in the eye and say I’m very sorry”.

Giving evidence in a clear, calm voice from the witness box of court 15 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Evans said an “inner sanctum of senior journalists” were aware of his phone-hacking activities. Two senior Sunday Mirror journalists inducted him into the eavesdropping technique when he joined the paper in April 2003, the court heard.

He said: “When I used the phrase inner circle, or inner sanctum, I was referring to a small group of senior journalists who taught me and tutored me in the practice of phone hacking and who were entitled to have the entire product passed up to them.

“I passed it to them so they had overarching knowledge of voicemail interceptions.” Further down the line “pretty much the entire newsroom” knew that phone hacking was taking place, he added.

Evans said he would have listened to thousands of voicemails while hacking phones, some of which were “detailed and highly emotive and highly private”.

Under cross-examination by Matthew Nicklin QC, counsel for the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People publisher Mirror Group Newspapers, Evans said he tossed eight pay-as-you-go phones – or “burners” – into the river Thames because he had been told to conceal his activities.

Asked where he did most of his phone hacking, Evans replied: “The most part at home. I also hacked from my desk occasionally. It was a mobile thing. I hacked from my car as well.”

Evans was giving evidence on behalf of eight phone-hacking victims, including the ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne and actor Sadie Frost, suing MGN for compensation before the judge, Mr Justice Mann.