A FORMER MP has been told his phone may have been hacked.
Shahid Malik, who represented Dewsbury in Parliament until last year, told the Examiner yesterday that detectives had warned him his voicemails may have been intercepted.
“I’ve been contacted by the Met who’ve asked me to provide them with some details to help establish if I’ve been hacked,” he said.
“I’m going to get in touch with them next week.”
Mr Malik, who was a junior minister in the last Labour Government, believes he may have been a target for News of the World journalists.
He said: “I think there’s every chance that an MP with any kind of profile would have been a target. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
The Metropolitan Police are investigating allegations of widespread phone-hacking at the News of the World, which closed this month because of the scandal.
There are believed to be as many as 4,000 victims.
In the past two weeks there have been claims that murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked while she was missing and that journalists also intercepted the voicemails of the families of terrorism victims.
Mr Malik said: “The industrial scale of this is quite frightening.
“If they can hack into the phones of Milly Dowler and the 7/7 families, then MPs would almost seem to be legitimate targets in comparison in the eyes of some.”
The former MP added he was “pretty relaxed” about the idea of his phone having been hacked.
“The important thing is that all of this comes out in the open,” he said.
Mr Malik, who represented Dewsbury from 2005 to 2010, believes the hacking scandal shows that self-regulation of newspapers has failed.
He said: “The Press Complaints Commission was a hopeless outfit that protected newspapers rather than victims. The sooner it’s scrapped, the better.
“I think that, at the end of this, we’re going to have a much healthier press which is free but also responsible.
“I think politics and the police will be better for it as well.”
