UPDATED Alastair Morgan to Rupert Murdoch "You are in a unique position to help us finally lay Daniel to rest."

With considerable speed and grace, on Monday 16 March, Rupert Murdoch replied to Alastair’s letter, promising to co-operate with the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel inquiry, and explaining how News Corp‘s Management and Standards Committee have already complied with requests from the police and the IPCC.

Questions about the role of News of the World and surveillance of chief investigating officer and his family were part of James Murdoch’s formal written submission to the Leveson Inquiry

Today, on the anniversary of his brother’s brutal murder in 1987, Alastair Morgan makes an impassioned appeal to Rupert Murdoch to fully co-operate with the Independent Panel Inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, chaired by Baroness O’Loan.

The full text of the letter Alastair just hand delivered to Rupert Murdoch is here . But the personal appeal towards the end is particularly striking:

The work of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel is almost entirely dependent on disclosure and I am appealing to you today – on the 28th anniversary of my brother’s murder – to ensure that News Corporation discloses all relevant material in confidence to the Panel.

Daniel’s murder, the police corruption and the ensuing years of failed investigations have been agony for the whole family. Daniel’s children have grown up without a father and my mother is now 86 years old. We need to know the truth about what happened to Daniel and why. You are in a unique position to help us finally lay Daniel to rest.

We feel that information released should include:
 News International emails deleted in 2010, but reconstructed in 7 ‘datapools’ by the software company Stroz Freidberg, and available for search on the Nomad system;
 Any relevant News International paperwork, formerly stored at the Crown archives; and
 The results of any internal investigations, such as the interviews carried out by lawyers from Linklaters in 2011-2012.

Finally, I would also ask you to urge any of your employees or former employees who have information about the murder or activities of Southern Investigations to contact the panel.

Having spent nearly four years working on this story in the wake of the Milly Dowler scandal, I’ve become more and more convinced that phone hacking was just the tip of an iceberg of illegal news gathering in the British press:  and that the Daniel Morgan Murder explains the dark mass beneath.

Indeed, my personal opinion is that it’s no coincidence that Glenn Mulcaire was hired as News of the World’s phone hacker just as Southern Investigations was disbanded. The length of time it took police to investigate that properly is also unlikely to be a coincidence.

The Daniel Morgan murder, and the police corruption around it, created a criminal-media nexus in the late 80s has spread outwards and upwards throughout the last three decades.

The Real Reason for Closing News of the World?

Rebekah Brooks explained to a packed ‘town hall’ meeting of News of the World journalists when she closed the paper in July 2011, she added that something worse than Milly Dowler would come out in a year or so to explain the decision.

But what could have been worse? The hacking of 7/7 victims or families of the two girls murdered in Soham? There’s little that could be worse than the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl, except perhaps the revelation that the world’s biggest selling English language newspaper had been colluding with suspected murderers for several decades.

There’s little doubt Brooks knew about the surveillance of the senior investigating officer around the murder in 2002.  Not only were her editors Greg Miskiw, Alex Marunchak and Mazher Mahmood’s photographer Bradley Page involved in the surveillance, but Glenn Mulcaire’s notebooks from the time are filled with details  on Cook and Hames.

According to Nick Davies in his book Hack Attack News Corp knew well in advance that a phone hacking story could go ‘Main Street’ and capture the public imagination. Sources say the Sun’s political editor Tom Newton Dunn approached Labour press supremo Tom Baldwin and told him “you can have Andy, but not Rebekah” a full two weeks before the Milly Dowler story broke in July 2011.

Three months previously in March 2011,  the pre-trial case against the murder suspects in the Daniel Morgan case had collapsed at the Old Bailey. News Corp must have been aware of the information leaking out once the contempt of court threat had lifted. The full story of the News of the World‘s complicity with the murder suspects, and interfering with the murder investigation was bound to come out.

But then they had a stroke of luck. The MSC discovered correspondence between the Sun crime correspondent Mike Sullivan and Dave Cook about a potential book. No money had been changed hands, and Cook’s story was completely in the public interest. But it was enough to silence him if disclosed to the Met.  Cook was promptly raided and interviewed under caution over misconduct, the day he was supposed to become a core Leveson participant in January 2012.

Three years on no charging decision has been made and Cook has remained muzzled.

So perhaps Brooks was being pessimistic about how long it would take the real reason for News of the World’s closure to come out. The legal restrictions around Cook, and around Marunchak and Rees who were arrested around suspicions of computer hacking have muffled any disclosure or debate because of the possibility of contempt. But that can’t last forever. And it doesn’t apply to those like Brooks, Miskiw or Mulcaire who have either been acquitted or served their time

So now is the time for senior News International journalists to come clean. I really hope Rebekah co-operates with the inquiry. She really has nothing to lose and could redeem her role in all this.

And just as he apologised to the Dowler family, I hope Rupert Murdoch does the honourable thing today, and fully commits to providing full disclosure to the panel so that this disturbing chapter in Fleet Street can be closed, and the Morgan family can find some kind of peace.

A Timeline of the Daniel Morgan Murder