How Much Did Rebekah Brooks know about the Daniel Morgan Murder

Opening segment Crossposted from Byline – do chip in and support my column on the criminal media nexus there if you can

Rebekah Brooks worked at News of the World for all but two years from 1989 to 2003. How much did she know know Southern Investigations and police inquiries into their role in the murder of Daniel Morgan?

We can all make mistakes.

In my last piece I erroneously said there was only one mention of the Daniel Morgan murder in the News of the World. In 1989, soon after the CPS dropped charges  against him in a second murder investigation, the Sunday tabloid published an interview with Jonathan Rees, Daniel’s former partner.

The interviewer, News of the World’s crime editor Alex Marunchak, failed  to mention that he had by then formed a successful business relationship with Rees and his private detective agency, Southern Investigations.

Fast forward eleven years, and there’s one more mention of Daniel on April 16 2000 .

Summer of 87: Two Violent Deaths, Two Rising Murdoch Stars

Crossposted from Byline – do chip in and support my column on the criminal media nexus there if you can

The 30 year cover-up of the Daniel Morgan murder is often portrayed as a murky morass. But revisiting the news coverage of the time, the outlines of the alleged conspiracy are clearer than you would imagine.

As the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel continues to sift through years of evidence on the most investigated  murder in British history,  four key characters emerge from the news coverage of the time.

DANIEL MORGAN

What is startling about the Daniel Morgan murder is that the key allegation of police conspiracy was made within weeks of the 37-year-old’s murder on 10 March 1987. The Times reported Daniel was “due to be interviewed by West Yorkshire police about a fraud he had uncovered.” Meanwhile, in the Daily Express:.. (CONTD)

Why the Mirror Group find it Hard to Investigate the Dark Arts and the Daniel Morgan Murder

It’s not widely realised that the first big investigation into corrupt private investigators, police officers and the press, was Operation Nigeria (which morphed into Operation Two Bridges) in 1999, seven years before the first phone hacking inquiry. That investigation specifically looked at two senior named News of the World Journalists.

But as Paddy French, who has indefatigably stood up details from this era in his Press Gang site reports today, it  wasn’t just the News of the World which was compromised by the ‘No 1 Corrupt Detectives Agency’. The Mirror Group were involved as well. This partly explains why – as Alastair Morgan was told by a Mirror journalist very recently – the story of his brother’s murder is ‘too political’ for the Mirror Group to cover.

Below are three extracts from Paddy French’s important second chapter on the murder. Please visit his site and real the whole in in full at  ROGUE JOURNALISTS & BENT COPPERS | PRESS GANG.