Former PM Brown was 'email hack victim'

Private investigators working on behalf of UK newspapers may have hacked into the emails of Gordon Brown, according to reports.

Operation Tuleta, the cybercrime strand of the police response to last year's News International phone hacking scandal, has uncovered the potential hacking of the former prime minister and others, The Independent reported on Monday.

There is nothing to say that News International itself was commissioning the private investigators — the report states the hacking was done at the bidding of "several Fleet Street titles".

Brown may have been targeted while he was chancellor of the exchequer, before he replaced Tony Blair, the police operation's analysis of seized private investigator computers has suggested. Former lobbyist Derek Draper is also named as a potential target, and former Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain has also said he has been interviewed by the Tuleta team.

As the phone hacking scandal exploded in the middle of 2011, Brown accused News of the World parent News International of hacking into his emails. He told Parliament that the publisher had deployed Trojans to gain access to targets' computers.

Although there is no indication of a connection to the Operation Tuleta investigation, a leaked email conversation between Draper and Brown special advisor Damien McBride in 2009 embarrassed the then-PM when the two discussed smearing David Cameron and other senior Tories. In the previous year, a separate leaked conversation between Draper and Peter Mandelson contained derogatory statements about Brown.

Operation Tuleta has eight police officers sifting through around 20 computers and 750,000 documents, The Independent noted, while the phone-hacking-focused Operation Weeting has 120 detectives and staff.

ZDNet UK asked the Metropolitan Police to for comment on the latest revelations, but was told only that the force will not "give a running commentary on an ongoing investigation".