The Daniel Morgan Murder: An Unsolved Mystery of the Murdoch Hacking Scandal

[DonViejo]

by Peter Jukes May 10, 2013 10:34 AM EDT

On Friday, Britain’s home secretary opened a judge-led public inquiry into the brutal and mysterious 1987 slaying of Daniel Morgan. Peter Jukes talks to Alastair Morgan, who hopes the decades-long cover-up of his brother’s death may finally be revealed.

It is Britain’s biggest unsolved murder, and described by a senior police officer as “the pivotal crime of the times.”

It plunges into the heart of what former prime minister Gordon Brown called the “criminal-media nexus” exposed by the hacking and bribes scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid titles. Only on this occasion the crimes went well beyond privacy intrusion and corrupt payments, to a brutal killing.

On Friday, home secretary Theresa May announced a judge-led public inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, who was found with an axe embedded in his head in a South London car park in 1987. The panel of experts will examine not only the police corruption that sabotaged five successive police investigations and caused the subsequent murder trial to collapse, but also the “connections between private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media and corruption involved in the linkages between them.”

Daniel Morgan ran a successful private investigations agency, Southern Investigations, with Jonathan Rees in the 1980s. However, as explained to The Daily Beast by his brother Alastair, Daniel had become suspicious of his business partner and concerned about police corruption. He was preparing to expose local police officers to the now-shuttered News of the World according to another colleague. But after a meeting with Rees, Daniel was murdered.

full article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/10/the-daniel-morgan-murder-an-unsolved-mystery-of-the-murdoch-hacking-scandal.html