Kate Middleton's name was found in a handwritten note by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator allegedly working for the News of the World who hacked phones of public figures and celebrities, the Old Bailey was told today by the prosecution, according to reports in The Guardian and other newspaper websites.
It has long been known that the royals were among the most enthusiastically targeted celebrities by the hackers, but today's revelation that Middleton's name was on a note seized from Mulcaire's premises in 2006 titled "Target evaluation," is the first time her name has been directly linked with the scandal.
In August 2006, the News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, were arrested by the Metropolitan Police, and later charged with hacking the telephones of members of the royal family. Both Goodman and Mulcaire pleaded guilty to the charges and were sentenced to four and six months imprisonment respectively.
In fact, the phone hacking scandal first came to light as a result of royal phone hacking. On November 13, 2006, an article appeared in the News of the World written by Clive Goodman, that claimed that Prince William was in the process of borrowing a portable editing suite from ITV royal correspondent Tom Bradby.
Mr Bradby, a former ITV News royal correspondent, later said of the incident, "I was due to have a private meeting with William and I was pretty surprised to find that, not only details of the meeting but of what we were going to discuss pitched up in the News of the World the Sunday before."When he and I hooked up we both looked at each other and said, 'Well how on earth did that get out?' and we worked out that only he and I and two people incredibly close to him had actually known about it."Then we started discussing one or two other things that had happened recently. There had been a meeting he had had with a knee surgeon that again only he and his personal secretary and the knee surgeon had known about that had got into the News of the World."Basically, the answer we came up with was that it must be something like breaking into mobile answering machine messages."And the rest, as they say, is history.
