Three leading mobile phone companies have told the Guardian that they have discovered a total of more than 100 customers whose voicemail was accessed by the private investigator and the journalist at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.

This directly contradicts the official version of events promoted by the newspaper and police that there were "only a handful" of victims in the scandal. And it puts new pressure on David Cameron's media adviser, Andy Coulson, who edited the paper at the time of the illegal activity and who has said repeatedly that he does not recall any of his journalists being involved in hacking anyone's voicemail messages.

The three phone companies – Orange, O2 and Vodafone – say they identified the customers three years ago, after Scotland Yard passed them phone numbers which had been used by the News of the World's private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, and the paper's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, when they called out to listen to the voicemail of their targets.

Searching through their records, the companies say they then traced customers whose voicemail had been accessed from those numbers. O2 says it found "about 40" whose voicemail had been successfully accessed; Vodafone says it found a similar number whose voicemail had been "intercepted"; and Orange says it found 45 customers whose voicemail had been dialled by Mulcaire or Goodman.

Scotland Yard has never revealed this information from the phone companies. The officer who led the inquiry, Andy Hayman, said there had been "only a handful" of victims, a claim echoed by senior officers in media briefings. The News of the World and Press Complaints Commission have taken the same line.

The true number of victims is likely to be much higher: the phone companies keep call data for only 12 months, but Mulcaire was involved in surveillance for the News of the World for nine years. Two other companies – T-Mobile and Three – say police never contacted them to ask them to check their records.

News Source :- http://www.guardian.co.uk

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