The phone-hacking scandal, which was thought to have been confined only to the Murdoch-owned newspapers, hit another leading media group on Thursday after Heather Mills, the former wife of Beatles singer Paul McCartney, alleged that her phone was hacked by a senior journalist from the Mirror Group whose titles include The Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror .
Ms. Mills told the BBC that the journalist admitted hearing a message left for her by Sir Paul in 2001 after the two had a row and she was travelling in India.
According to her, the reporter rang and “started quoting verbatim the messages from my machine”.
“He said, ‘Oh I heard you have had a big argument with your boyfriend', and I said, ‘And why would you know this...You've obviously hacked my phone and if you do anything with this story... I'll go to the police,'” she said.
He responded: “OK, OK, yeah we did hear it on your voice messages, I won't run it.”
The allegation prompted calls for Piers Morgan, the then Editor of the Daily Mirror and now a high-profile American TV anchor, to be summoned before the House of Commons media committee which is investigating the scandal.
Ms. Mills said the intercepted message appeared to be the same that Mr. Morgan referred to in a newspaper article in 2006 article saying: “At one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone.”
Mr. Morgan dismissed her claim as “unsubstantiated”.
“To reiterate, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone,” he said.
The Mirror Group said: “All our journalists work within the criminal law and the PCC [Press Complaints Commission] code of conduct.”
