Nation & World

LONDON — Questions about illegal computer hacking by the Times of London were raised Thursday when officials at the judicial inquiry into press ethics said they would recall the paper's editor for further testimony and police confirmed they were investigating an incident in 2009 in which one of the paper's reporters apparently hacked an email account.

The bulk of the police investigation has focused on phone hacking, which officials at Rupert Murdoch's News International have admitted was rampant at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

Hacking into people's emails is a potentially more serious crime than listening to their voice-mail messages, and last summer police began an investigation into computer hacking that is being held in tandem with one on phone hacking and another on bribing the police.

One suspect, identified only as a 52-year-old man, was arrested in November on suspicion of computer hacking as part of that inquiry. He has not been charged.

The judicial investigation earlier heard testimony by the editor of The Times of London, James Harding, referring to an incident in 2009 when an email account was illegally accessed by one of the paper's reporters. The account belonged to a police officer who was writing a blog under the pseudonym NightJack and whose true identity was subsequently revealed by the paper. It is this incident that the police say they are looking at.

Harding told the judicial-investigation panel that he had reprimanded the reporter and directed him to find the officer's identity legally.

"When the reporter informed his managers that, in the course of his investigation, he had on his own initiative sought unauthorized access to an email account, he was told that if he wanted to pursue the story he had to use legitimate means to do so," Harding wrote in a statement to the committee. "He did, identifying the person ... using his own sources and information publicly available on the Internet."

The reporter has since left the paper.

A spokesman for the inquiry said Harding would appear next week to answer further questions. He did not elaborate.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police said they had responded to a letter from Tom Watson, a Labour member of Parliament who has pushed for investigations into News International, that asked them to examine computer hacking at The Times of London in light of the revelations.

"The concerns raised within your letter are under investigation," Detective Superintendent John Levett wrote in his response to Watson.