Were the police to blame for Milly's deleted voicemails? NoW 'was not responsible for raising false hope'

Police face mounting evidence that they were responsible for inadvertently deleting voicemail messages left for Milly Dowler.


Incendiary claims that News of the World journalists erased the missing teenager’s messages provoked public uproar and drove the phone-hacking scandal into the open.


Her mother Sally gave a heart-rending account of how the discovery led her to believe the 13-year-old was still alive.


Giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry into media standards, she described how one day after Milly went missing she found her daughter’s voicemail box had apparently been emptied. ‘I just jumped and said “She’s picked up her voicemails, she’s alive”,’ she told the inquiry.      More