LONDON: Prince Harry on Tuesday lost his high-profile case against the Daily Mail’s publisher for alleged unlawful information gathering in yet another blow to the estranged royal as he begins a fraught five-day trip back to the UK.
A written judgement by London’s High Court published following an 11-week trial earlier this year said the “claimants failed to prove their pleaded allegations... the claims are therefore dismissed”.
The ruling was delivered as Harry attended an event in the capital, with Associated Newspapers calling it an “overwhelming victory” and a “magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail’s journalism”.
It said the court’s dismissal of “every single one of the 97 allegations made by the claimants” showed Judge Matthew Nicklin had “accepted the honesty of our journalists’ evidence on how they sourced their stories”.
Allegations that bugs had been placed in people’s cars and homes, calls listened to and bank accounts illicitly accessed had been “lurid” and “preposterous” with “no credible evidence” ever presented, Associated said in a statement. “The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated,” it added.
