2nd UK Police Official Resigns In Murdoch Scandal

The New York Times reports:

Britain’s phone hacking scandal claimed another high-profile casualty on Monday when John Yates, the deputy commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, resigned a day after the country’s top police officer quit and Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, was arrested on suspicion of illegally intercepting phone calls and bribing the police.

Such is the severity of the crisis swirling around the Murdoch empire and Britain’s public life that Prime Minister David Cameron cut short an African trip on Monday and bowed to opposition pressure for a special parliamentary session on Wednesday to debate the widening scandal.

Mr. Yates is a well-known officer who had been involved in an earlier and inconclusive police review of the scandal. The Metropolitan Police announced his resignation and said he would make a statement later on Monday. He and other officers have been under scrutiny by lawmakers trying to determine why the Metropolitan Police decided in 2009 to strictly limit the initial phone-hacking inquiry dating to 2006. Mr. Yates told reporters on Monday that he had “done nothing wrong.”