Prince Harry to tabloid newspaper's lawyer: 'Nobody wants to be phone hacked'

LONDON (AP) — Prince Harry entered a London courtroom on a mission to prove that the publisher of the Daily Mirror tabloid had hacked his phone and unlawfully snooped on his life.

He left the witness box Wednesday having shown that he was highly suspicious of how Mirror Group Newspapers obtained information for stories about him, but without offering phone records or much other evidence to support his hacking claim.

“I believe that phone hacking was at an industrial scale across at least three of the papers at the time,” the Duke of Sussex asserted in his second day of testimony in London's High Court. “That is beyond any doubt.”

Phone hacking is central to his case against Mirror Group and two related lawsuits against other British tabloid publishers that he claims invaded his privacy by eavesdropping on emails and using other illegal methods to report on the smallest details of his life, causing him great emotional turmoil.

Harry is the first senior member of the royal family to testify in court in over 130 years, and his high-stakes gamble in taking his cases to trial is unprecedented in modern times. In addition to a desire to hold the newspapers accountable for a “destructive” role in his life and what he said was a cover-up of the hacking scandal, the pursuit indicates the seriousness of his larger mission to reform the press.

“Finding out about this level of cover up is what makes me want to see my MGN claim through to the end, so people can really understand what happened,” he testified.

During cross-examination, Mirror Group attorney Andrew Green pressed the prince to explain which elements of articles had come from hacking and how he could prove it without providing call data.

Harry continued to insist that parts of certain stories were suspicious and said...