Taped
Police secretly bugging lawyer-inmate meetings at UK prisons
Police secretly recorded hundreds of prison conversations between inmates and their lawyers, a news report said Saturday. Opposition parties demanded that the government widen its investigation into the alleged practice.
Justice Secretary Jack Straw called earlier in the week for an investigation into one such alleged bugging case after former police officer Mark Kearney said he had been ordered to secretly tape conversations between governing Labour Party lawmaker Sadiq Khan and Babar Ahmad, a childhood friend jailed while facing extradition to the U.S. on terrorism charges.
Straw denied knowledge of the surveillance at Woodhill Prison in Milton Keynes, western England, and said government ministers were not informed.
However, the Justice Ministry said some civil servants became aware of the concerns in December.
On Saturday, The Daily Telegraph said in a front-page story that the Khan-Ahmad case was just one of many secret eavesdropping cases that allegedly occurred at Woodhill after security was stepped up in Britain following the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. in 2001.
Quoting an unidentified "whistleblower," the paper said police secretly tapes hundreds of conversations between lawyers and their clients at Woodhill, and the same practice may have taken place at other British prisons, too.
The paper's source was not identified but two opposition parties, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, reacted to the story by saying that Straw should widen his investigation to find out how much bugging has occurred at British prisons.
David Davis, who handles national security issues for the Conservatives, said such an investigation should determine if the practice is widespread and whether Cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government know about it.
Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: "It is quite astonishing, and we need an immediate inquiry into exactly what has gone on."
(Published by International Herald Tribune, February 11, 2008)