Scottish police on Wednesday detained British Prime Minister David Cameron’s former media chief Andy Coulson on suspicion of committing perjury.
Coulson, 44, was detained at his home in London. Under Scottish law, suspects can be detained for up to 12 hours before being either released or arrested. It is understood he is being taken to Glasgow. He joined Cameron’s team after resigning as editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper in 2007 following the conviction of its royal reporter and a private investigator for phone hacking.
He gave evidence in the perjury trial of socialist politician Tommy Sheridan at the High Court in Scottish city in December 2010 in a case relating to a News of the World story.
“Officers from Strathclyde Police’s Operation Rubicon team detained a 44-year-old man in London this morning under section 14 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 on suspicion of committing perjury before the High Court in Glasgow,” a spokeswoman for the force told AFP. “This is an ongoing inquiry and therefore no further information is available at this time.”
Separately, Coulson was arrested in July last year by London’s Metropolitan Police on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption during his tenure at the now-closed News of the World, owned by Murdoch’s British newspaper arm News International, from 2003 to 2007.
Coulson has consistently denied all knowledge of such practices.
After quitting the News of the World in January 2007, Coulson become communications director for Cameron’s Conservative Party in July that year. He became the government’s communications chief after the Conservatives entered office in May 2010.
But he resigned in January 2011 after coming under pressure over the phone-hacking scandal.
Sheridan, 48, is a former Scottish Socialist Party leader and ex-member of the Scottish Parliament.
The News of the World had claimed that Sheridan was an adulterer who visited a swingers’ club.
Sheridan won a 2006 defamation action against the now-defunct weekly and was awarded £200,000 ($310,000, 250,000 euros).
