Saturday, July 30, 2011

Sean Hoare: The Met's Indecent Haste

Apart from raising the obvious questions that the writer displays in the leader, there were a couple of other things that caught my eye. The role played by our erstwhile top cop John, 'Integrity' Yates in this sorry saga of corruption and cover-up, and the other, just down the page slightly.

Why did UK police declare death of News of the World whistleblower “not suspicious?”
By Chris Marsden
20 July 2011

When the former News of the World reporter Sean Hoare was found dead Monday at his home in Watford, north of London, the immediate response of the Hertfordshire police was to issue a public statement declaring his death to be “unexplained but not thought to be suspicious.”

The statement is at the very least extraordinary, and at worst sinister in its implications.......
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Hoare’s claims were passed on to the Metropolitan Police, who said he declined to give evidence. The Guardian’s Nick Davies paints a fuller picture more damaging to the police. He writes that Hoare was “offended when Scotland Yard's former assistant commissioner, John Yates, assigned officers to interview him, not as a witness but as a suspect. They told him anything he said could be used against him, and, to his credit, he refused to have anything to do with them.”


And this from the Mail, editor Paul Dacre, doing what it does best, sucking establishment cock.

The Daily Mail ran a piece specifically seeking to dismiss any and all questions of possible wrongdoing in Hoare’s death. It described him as “a paranoid recluse who believed someone was out to get him,” citing an unnamed “friend and neighbour.”

The newspaper added that he had “spent much of the last weeks of his life ‘hiding’ in his flat with the curtains drawn.” It quoted Hoare’s friend as saying, “He would talk about someone from the Government coming to get him. He’d say to me, ‘If anyone comes by, don’t say I’m in.’”

Given that he was involved in a scandal that is threatening the government, the police and one of the world’s major news corporations—and the treatment already meted out to him—such caution was not paranoia, but common sense. Read full article

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