British actor Hugh Grant and his former girlfriend, socialite Jemima Khan, obtained a court order Wednesday requiring police to hand over evidence indicating their phones may have been hacked.
High Court judge Geoffrey Vos ruled that it was "expedient and proper" that they be able to see information seized in 2006 by police from Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the now defunct News of the World.
"This has been done to discover whether the information was used in articles by the News of the World and other newspapers," said a statement from their lawyers, Atkins Thomson, on their website.
Lawyers for Grant and Khan, who were in a relationship for three years before they split in 2007, had asked for the disclosure order during a hearing in London. The application was not opposed by police.
Four years ago, Mulcaire and former News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman were jailed for plotting to hack into royal aides' telephone messages.
During the investigation that led to their convictions, police seized 11,000 pages of notes from Mulcaire. These files have been the basis for allegations that many more people were targeted in the phone hacking. In April, Grant - who starred in the 1994 film "Four Weddings and a Funeral" - wrote an article in the New Statesman magazine in which he described how a former News of the World executive told him that his phone had been hacked.
Earlier this month Khan wrote a lengthy article for The Independent newspaper's website describing the "long, painful process of trying to find out the truth" about how she was hacked.
"The press, police and parliament have all colluded on the issue of phone hacking," Khan wrote. Neither Grant, 50, nor Khan, 37, daughter of billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith and ex-wife of former Pakistan cricket star Imran Khan, were at Wednesday's hearing. Police refused to comment on the case while a new investigation into hacking, launched in January, was ongoing.
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