Sun staff 'treated like crime gang' (From Ealing Times)

Sun staff 'treated like crime gang'

12:20pm Monday 13th February 2012 in National News © Press Association 2011

A senior figure at The Sun has launched a forthright attack on police who arrested five Sun journalists, claiming his colleagues had been treated like "members of an organised crime gang".

The journalists were among eight people arrested at the weekend over allegations of improper payments to police and public officials.

Trevor Kavanagh, the newspaper's associate editor, said the police investigation into alleged press malpractice was regarded by many as a "witch-hunt" and suggested that free speech in the UK was under attack.

In a strongly-worded article printed in the tabloid, he argued that those arrested had been released on "draconian" bail terms like those imposed on suspected terrorists.

He wrote: "The Sun is not a 'swamp' that needs draining. Nor are those other great News International titles, The Times and The Sunday Times.

"Yet in what would at any other time cause uproar in Parliament and among civil liberty and human rights campaigners, its journalists are being treated like members of an organised crime gang.

"They are subjects of the biggest police operation in British criminal history - bigger even than the Pan Am Lockerbie murder probe."

He added: "Instead of being called in for questioning, 30 journalists have been needlessly dragged from their beds in dawn raids, arrested and held in police cells while their homes are ransacked.

"Wives and children have been humiliated as up to 20 officers at a time rip up floorboards and sift through intimate possessions, love letters and entirely private documents."

The arrests of deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker, and John Sturgis, who is a news editor, sparked speculation that the red top would go the same way as the News of the World.