By IANS,
London : The defence editor of Britain’s The Sun newspaper was arrested over allegations of corrupt payments made to public officials. She was later released on bail, the Daily Mail reported Thursday.
Virginia Wheeler, 32, becomes the 23rd person to be detained by Scotland Yard as part of Operation Elveden.
News International, the British wing of the News Corporation, said its Management and Standards Committee (MSC) had provided information to the probe that led to the arrests and had also provided the option of “immediate legal representation” to those arrested.
But a defiant Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, visited London last month as the crisis engulfed the paper, cleared his arrested staff members to go back to work, saying “everyone is innocent until proven guilty”.
Wheeler is The Sun’s first female defence editor and reported from the front line in Libya last year. Police are understood to have wanted to question her for several weeks, but she has been on holiday in Argentina.
The News Corporation owns The Sun, The Times and the now-defunct News of the World.
Operation Elveden – which runs alongside the Metropolitan Police probe into phone hacking called Operation Weeting team – was launched as the scandal erupted last July with allegations about News of the World targeting Milly Dowler’s mobile phone.
The 13-year-old girl was abducted on her way home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, March 21, 2002, and subsequently murdered. Her body was discovered Sep 18, 2002.