Milly Dowler voicemails 'may have automatically deleted'

 

Milly Dowler was abducted and murdered by Levi Bellfield in 2002

Milly Dowler's voicemail messages were "most likely" deleted automatically, says the Metropolitan Police.

The force told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics it does not have evidence journalists deleted messages on the murdered schoolgirl's hacked phone.
Lawyers for the Dowler family say it is too early to say journalists did not delete messages
Lord Justice Leveson, head of the inquiry into media ethics, said he needed police to clarify events because the Met's statement was of significance.
The allegation that News of the World journalists deleted messages first appeared in the Guardian newspaper - and was a turning point in the hacking affair, contributing to the closure of the News of the World.
In a statement to the inquiry, Neil Garnham QC, for the Metropolitan Police, said detectives now thought that Milly Dowler's voicemails had been probably automatically deleted because they were more than 72 hours old by the time her parents had got through to her voicemail.
'False hope' Days after her disappearance, Milly's parents had a moment of false hope when they found they could leave messages on her phone, suggesting to them that their daughter had been picking up previous messages and had deleted them.
Mr Garnham said: "It is conceivable that News International journalists[other than private investigator Glen Mulcaire] deleted the voicemails, but the Metropolitan Police Service have no evidence to support that."
He said "most likely explanation" was that messages were automatically removed after 72 hours, and added that the network provider had confirmed that this was "a standard automatic function of that voicemail box system at the time".
"I can say from Metropolitan Police Service records that the Metropolitan Police did not tell the Dowlers that voicemails had been deleted, for the simple reason that they did not know of any such deletions," he added.
Mr Mulcaire has denied deleting messages.
Phone-hacking detectectives have now asked Surrey Police officers, who led the hunt for Milly Dowler in 2002, to give statements.
Confusion over events The Met's statement to the Leveson inquiry came after mounting confusion over exactly what News of the World journalists allegedly did when they accessed Milly Dowler's phone.
In an article on Saturday, the Guardian said new evidence had led police to conclude the News of the World was not responsible for the deletion of voicemails from Milly Dowler's mobile phone that had caused her parents to have false hopes that she was alive.
The News of the World reporters were likely to have inadvertently deleted some of Milly's other messages as her phone would automatically delete messages 72 hours after being listened to. That led some former journalists from the newspaper to demand an apology from the Guardian.
But David Sherborne, counsel for the victims of hacking including the Dowlers, questioned the Met's new statement, saying Surrey Police had the name of one journalist who had Milly Dowler's mobile number and pin.
Mr Sherborne said that there was evidence that someone had continued to access and delete voicemails over a number of days leading up to the false hope moment and that there were "only so many culprits".