The case against the officer, Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, 53, stemmed from a telephone call in September 2010 in which, prosecutors say, she gave a reporter for The News of the World details of a newly reopened investigation into accusations of voice mail hacking by the tabloid. At the time of the call, Ms. Casburn was a senior officer in Scotland Yard’s top-secret counterterrorism unit, code-named SO15.
With at least six separate inquiries into different aspects of the scandal, and a total of 180 police officers and officials assigned to the work, the overall police operation has been described by senior police officials as the most extensive — and expensive — criminal investigation in Scotland Yard’s history. Altogether, more than 90 people have been arrested, though fewer than a dozen have been charged. Prosecutors have said that charges against others are likely to follow.
Investigations that have turned up evidence of police wrongdoing, in the form of alleged payments and other benefits given by the tabloids to serving officers in return for confidential information, have been a factor in a battery of high-level resignations. Police commanders say progress in the investigations, and successful prosecutions, will be an important test for Scotland Yard, formally known as the Metropolitan Police Service, whose reputation has been badly battered by the scandal.
In addition to corrupt payments to police and other public officials, the charges laid out so far by prosecutors include conspiracy to intercept cellphone messages, the touchstone of the investigations, involving hundreds of celebrities, politicians, sports stars and crime victims; and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by destroying or hiding evidence, including e-mails and other documents.
Others facing trial this year include Andy Coulson, a News of the World editor who went on to become Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications director at 10 Downing Street; Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of two Murdoch tabloids, The News of the World and The Sun, who resigned as the chief executive of News International, the Murdoch newspaper subsidiary in Britain, as the scandal unfolded in 2011; and Charlie Brooks, Ms. Brooks’s husband, who is a prominent racehorse trainer and Eton College contemporary — and friend — of Mr. Cameron.
The focus of the trial that began Monday was a nine-minute phone call that the defendant, Ms. Casburn, made to The News of the World when she was responsible for a Scotland Yard unit that tracked terrorist financing, an assignment she won partly because of her background in investment finance in the City of London.
The prosecution says the call was prompted by a renewed investigation into the paper’s involvement in phone hacking that had begun the previous day. The court was told that the new inquiry, by John Yates, one of Scotland Yard’s top officers, had been ordered because of a magazine article detailing phone hacking by The News of the World that The New York Times had published 10 days earlier.
The prosecutor, Mark Bryant-Heron, said Ms. Casburn had told one of the tabloid’s reporters that Mr. Yates, then in charge of the Scotland Yard counterterrorism effort, was “looking at six people” as a result of the article. The two she named, the prosecutor said, were Mr. Coulson, the paper’s former editor, and Sean Hoare, a former reporter who was named in the Times article as confirming that phone hacking was rife at the paper when he worked there. Mr. Hoare died in 2011.
According to the prosecution’s account, Ms. Casburn explained her motive for the call by telling the reporter, Tim Wood, that she objected to the diversion of Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism resources to the phone-hacking inquiry and to the political pressure being brought to bear on Mr. Yates by John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister whose cellphone had been hacked.
The court was told that the tabloid did not publish an article on the basis of Ms. Casburn’s call and that no payment was made to her. In an e-mail to his editors cited in court, Mr. Wood said Ms. Casburn had asked to be paid, but the court was told that she had denied this in police interviews. On the stand, Mr. Wood seemed uncertain. While his “recollection” was “not great,” he said, Ms. Casburn “must have said she wanted to be paid” for him to have suggested that she had.