UK police blogger wins damages from The Times of London's publisher over hacked email

LONDON – A police blogger unmasked after the Times of London hacked his email has been awarded 42,500 pounds ($68,000) in damages from the newspaper's publisher.

Rupert Murdoch's News International, which publishes the Times, confirmed Tuesday it had agreed to pay damages and legal costs for Richard Horton.

The Times unmasked Horton as the detective behind the award-winning "NightJack" blog in a controversial 2009 piece Horton unsuccessfully sued to try to suppress.

According to an account of the lawsuit published in Britain's New Statesman magazine, Horton's lawyer raised the possibility that the detective's Hotmail account had been illegally accessed — an allegation dismissed as "baseless" in 2009 by a Times lawyer.

However, senior Times managers have since admitted one of their reporters had accessed Horton's account.