Murdoch papers accused of breaking data protection rules

Rupert Murdoch's flagship daily paper The Sun has been accused of breaching data protection laws to obtain medical records detailing former prime minister Gordon Brown's infant son's cystic fibrosis condition.

Reporters on The Sun, or their confederates, are suspected of using a practice known as "blagging", where people impersonate someone over the phone, to obtain the personal information. The paper strenuously denies any wrongdoing.

All this comes as Murdoch fights to maintain his bid for the 61 per cent of shares in BSkyB which his company News Corporation does not already own.

A story on The Guardian's web site says that in October 2006, Rebekah Brooks, then editor of The Sun and now chief executive of News International, telephoned Brown's office to reveal the paper had received details on four-year-old Fraser Brown's condition, causing the Browns "immense distress".

The Sun then published the story.

Four years before, by means which have not been ascertained, unidentified media outlets discovered that the Browns' first child, Jennifer, had suffered a fatal brain haemorrhage and published that story the weekend before she died in January, 2002.

And in 2003, according to the report, Devon and Cornwall police found one of its junior officers was providing information from the Police National Computer to a network of private investigators, one of whom, Glen Lawson, of Abbey Investigations, commissioned a search of police records for information on Brown and later on two other Labour MPs, Nick Brown, the party's chief whip, and Martin Salter.

The searches were revealed in previously unreported court transcripts, which showed the search on Salter was conducted around the time Brooks, then editor of the News of the World, was attacking him for refusing to support her paper's "Sarah's Law" campaign to name paedophiles.

The Guardian said Lawson has refused to identify the journalist who commissioned him.

The force contacted Brown's office – he was then Chancellor – to warn him but was blocked by a judge from pursuing the case against the private investigators.

The allegations are among several revealed as MPs were questioning Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Jeremy Hunt about his statement in the Commons referring the BSkyB purchase to the Competition Commission.

Brown was said to have been "shocked" at the intrusion into his family's life.

News International said it noted the allegations, adding: "We ask that all information concerning these allegations is provided to us so that we can investigate these matters further."