UK tabloids sued by Prince Harry say they used legitimate sources

LONDON - Two UK tabloids accused of phone hacking and other "unlawful information gathering" against Prince Harry and six high-profile figures insisted Tuesday they had relied on "legitimate" sources for their stories.

On the second day of an anticipated nine-week High Court trial, Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) -- the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday -- began mounting its defence to alleged privacy breaches.

It rejects claims by Harry, pop icon Elton John and his husband David Furnish, and four other well-known figures that it illegally intercepted voicemail messages, listened in on phone calls and deceptively obtained private information.

The prince, who sat in court on Monday and Tuesday, may now take the stand to give evidence as early as Wednesday.

The seven claimants accuse ANL of paying private investigators implicated in other phone-hacking lawsuits for some of the unlawful information used to generate dozens of stories.

The accusations cover a period from at least 1993 to 2018 in some instances.

But Antony White, representing ANL, said the trial will show that it has "provided an explanation through a long series of witnesses of the sourcing by its journalists of the 50-plus articles" concerned.

"Overall, it provides a compelling account of a pattern of legitimate sourcing of articles," he added.

White added that the claims would have required wholesale lying by reporters and others at the newspapers.

"The inherent improbability that such a large number of journalists would do that should be borne in mind," White argued.

The allegations around payments to private investigators were "clutching at straws in the wind", he added.

'SUBSTANTIAL DAMAGES'

It is the third and final case brought against a British newspaper publisher by Harry, who has called it his "mission" to take on the tabloids "for the greater good".

King Charles III's younger son has long blamed the media for the death of his mother Princess Diana, who was killed in a high-speed Paris car crash in 1997 while trying to shake off the paparazzi.

Harry made history in 2023 by becoming the first senior British royal to take the stand in more than a century, when he testified as part of his successful hacking claim against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).

Last year, he also settled in his court action against Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloid publisher, which agreed to pay him "substantial damages" for privacy breaches, including phone hacking.

Opening the seven claimants' case against ANL on Monday, their lawyer David Sherborne said he will show "there was clear and systematic use of unlawful gathering of information" at the publisher.

He added that ANL "knew they had skeletons in their closet" and that years of "emphatic denials were not true".

Concluding his opening statement Tuesday, Sherborne said if the claimants won the case, "the damages will have to be significant given what the activities involved".