14 DAY TRIAL // According to victims notified by the police, the criminal investigation targeting former News of the World (NotW) employees has been expanded to include computer hacking.
The new investigation, called Operation Tuleta, will focus on suspicions that News of the World reporters paid a hacker to infect the computer of former British army intelligence officer Ian Hurst with a trojan.
Hurst served in Northern Ireland and was believed to have information about a high-ranking mole in the IRA. Copies of emails sent by Hurst were stolen by a trojan and made their way to a NotW reporter.
Alex Marunchak, the newspaper's then editor for Ireland, denies ever seeing the emails, although there are suspicions that he received copies from the reporter.
Hurst confirmed that he was contacted by police investigators ''in regards to my family's computer being illegally accessed over a sustained period during 2006.''
The new allegations are an extension of the probe into NotW journalists using voicemail hacking to obtain stories. That investigation led to News International closing the newspaper earlier this month.
But Hurst might not be the only victim. Dr Brooke Magnanti, author of Diary of a London Call Girl, who anonymously wrote about her experiences as a London escort until November 2009, believes that reporters from The Sunday Times, another News International newspaper, tried to infect her compurter with a trojan back in 2005.
In a post on her blog she tells the story of how she was on a public library computer in Clearwater, Florida, in 2005 and received from a journo at the Sunday Times.
"There was an attachment. The attachment started downloading automatically (then if I remember correctly, came up with a 'failed to download' message). My heart sank - my suspicion was that there had been a program attached to the message, some sort of trojan, presumably trying to get information from my computer," Magnanti writes.
Zoe Margolis, another risque blogger who published her blog under the pseudonym Abby Lee, also believes that she was targeted with a trojan by journalists from The Sunday Times who eventually outed her in August 2006.