2012年11月20日星期二

Another Top Police Official Resigns in British Scandal

Supra Red Vaiders, He and other officers have been under scrutiny by lawmakers trying to determine why the Metropolitan Police decided in 2009 to strictly limit an initial phone-hacking inquiry dating to 2006. Mr. Yates told reporters on Monday he had \"done nothing wrong.\"
Speaking in South Africa, Mr. Cameron said Parliament would be extended beyond the start of its scheduled summer recess for an emergency session on Wednesday, a day after Mr. Murdoch, his son James and Ms. Brooks are set to testify to a parliamentary inquiry into the scandal.

He made the announcement hours after Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Supra Red Vaiders commonly known as the Met, or Scotland Yard, said that he had decided to step down because \"the ongoing speculation and accusations relating to the Met\'s links with News International at a senior level\" had made it difficult for him to do his job. News International is the British newspaper subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch\'s News Corporation.

But Sir Paul said that he had done Supra Red Vaiders nothing wrong. He also said that because he had not been involved in the original phone-hacking investigation, he had had no idea that Neil Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor who had become a public-relations consultant for the police after leaving the paper, was himself suspected of phone hacking, as the unauthorized accessing of voice mail is known.

Mr. Wallis, 60, was arrested last Thursday. His name has also been linked to Mr. Yates.

Boris Johnson, the London mayor, said on Supra Red Vaiders Monday that Mr. Yates decided to resign after police authorities informed him that he would be suspended while his ties to Mr. Wallis were investigated. At a news conference, Mr. Johnson said Mr. Yates had told him last year that that he did not believe there was \"anything at the end of the rainbow\" to justify reopening the original phone hacking inquiry.

Mr. Yates has been criticized for his decision not to reopen the investigation even though the police under his command possessed some 11,000 pages of largely unexamined evidence, some of in trash bags. \"I\'m not going to go down and look at bin bags,\" Mr. Yates said.

He has acknowledged also publicly contacts with Mr. Wallis, telling a parliamentary committee in March that he could not remember exactly when he last had lunch with Mr. Wallis, but that it \"may well\" have been in February.

Sir Paul and Mr. Yates have been asked to appear on Tuesday before Parliament\'s home affairs committee investigating police behavior in the scandal. Mr. Yates testified before the committee last week, but was asked on Monday to return to clarify some points.

On Sunday, Sir Paul tried to deflect attention from his own role by implicitly criticizing Mr. Cameron\'s decision in 2009 to hire Andy Coulson, another former News of the World editor, as his own spokesman. At least Mr. Wallis had not resigned from the paper under a cloud, as Mr. Coulson had, the commissioner said.

The crisis has exploded in the two weeks since reports that The News of the World ordered the hacking of the cellphone of a 13-year-old girl who had been abducted and murdered in 2002.