New hacking allegation piles pressure on Murdoch

Prime Minister David Cameron led a chorus of condemnation on Tuesday over allegations a top-selling British newspaper from Rupert Murdoch's global media empire hacked the voicemail of a missing schoolgirl who was later found murdered.
Suggestions that in 2002 a News of the World investigator listened in to, and deleted, messages left for the cellphone of the 13-year-old, misleading police and her family, caused uproar in parliament, where the tactics and power of the tabloid press, many of them Murdoch titles, have long caused controversy.
The gravest accusations yet drove the long-rumbling scandal into the heart of Murdoch's News Corp: it came as it seeks official approval to take over broadcaster BSkyB ; and forced Rebekah Brooks, a Murdoch confidante who was the News of the World editor at the time, to plead ignorance and say she would not resign as head of News Corp's British newspaper arm.
Pressure is unlikely to let up, however. A least one major advertiser, carmaker Ford, said it was pulling ads from the News of the World - though not the other Murdoch papers - until it saw how the tabloid dealt with the new allegation. And police looking into phone hacking by the newspaper later said they had been in touch with the parents involved in another notorious child murder, when two 10-year-old girls were seized and killed by school caretaker in the town of Soham in 2002.
Suggestions that the News of the World's activities might have hampered police and given false hope to the family of the murdered teenager, Milly Dowler, caused uproar in Britain and moved Cameron to comment while on a visit to Afghanistan. "On the question about the really appalling allegations about the telephone of Milly Dowler, if they are true, this is a truly dreadful act," Cameron told journalists in Kabul. Lawmakers agreed to clear three hours of parliamentary time for an emergency debate on the issue on Wednesday.
Cameron had until now said little about the phone hacking scandal, which forced the resignation earlier this year of his own spokesman, another former editor of the News of the World. The phone-hacking affair, in which journalists desperate to boost circulation dialled in to mobile phone voicemail servers of public figures in the hunt for stories, has rumbled for years - the News of the World's royal correspondent and a private investigator were jailed in 2007 after hacking for scoops.