News International is facing a massive compensation bill after it emerged that police have identified 829 "likely victims" of phone hacking.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, who is in charge of three separate criminal probes into the Murdoch media empire, today told the Leveson inquiry that her detectives had found hundreds of names with "detail" that suggested they had been targeted by the News of the World.
The senior police officer also revealed that police are trying to contact a journalist on the Sun who is abroad. She told the judicial investigation into the press that she had 150 staff working on the three operations, making it the biggest criminal inquiry in the UK.
Miss Akers said her officers were trawling through 11,000 pages of documents seized from the home of disgraced private investigator Glen Mulcaire, who was jailed for phone hacking in 2006.
Her staff are also analysing 300 million emails handed over by News International and examining four terabytes of further electronic data, which she described as "vast".
She said that the Metropolitan Police had identified 829 "likely victims" of phone hacking among the material. She added: "We have defined likely victims as those who have detail around their names that would suggest to us that they have been hacked or have the potential for being hacked." Miss Akers said there were 4,375 names with matching phone numbers in the Mulcaire documents and that detectives had contacted 1,578 of those potential victims.
Miss Akers, who joined Scotland Yard in 1976, also gave further details of the investigation into alleged bribery of police officers by journalists at The Sun.
Ten days ago, detectives arrested four current and former employees of Britain's biggest selling newspaper on suspicion of corruption.
Miss Akers told Lord Justice Leveson that police were still trying to speak to one senior journalist from the daily tabloid who is abroad on a sabbatical.
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She revealed that Operation Weeting - which began more than a year ago and is focused on phone hacking allegations - had 90 staff.
Operation Elveden - into alleged bribery of public officials and Operation Tuleta - into alleged computer hacking - have 40 and 20 staff working on them respectively.
Miss Akers said that she would "like to think" that Operation Weeting was "closer to the finishing line than the starting gun" but admitted the other two investigations could take many months to conclude. The inquiry continues.
