source: Byline Times

published: 19 January 2026

Image Credit: Pong at www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Whatever the outcome of the civil trial between various claimants and Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the newspaper group behind the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, the legal claims shed light again on what former prime minister Gordon Brown called “the criminal media nexus” — a circle of dodgy journalists and corrupt police officers circulating around the hub of the private detective agency Southern Investigations.

These horrific murders may seem like ancient history, but they are at the centre of astonishing legal claims against the UK’s largest newspaper publisher and owner of one of the world’s most-read online news websites, which is currently bidding to increase its hold on the British media by buying the Telegraph group.

The murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence took place six years apart, but only a few miles away from each other in south‑east London. And they are connected by more than just geographical proximity.

Both murder investigations were stymied by the same cartel of corrupt police officers with gangland affiliations, and ready access to the British popular press.

Anyone who saw the recent TV drama The Hack, or has followed the podcast Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder that I hosted and produced with Deeivya Meir ten years ago, will understand the centrality of Southern Investigations to the spread of the dark arts of “unlawful information gathering” (UIG) after one of its founders, Daniel Morgan, was slain with an axe in the car park of a Sydenham pub in 1987.

After Daniel’s murder, his co‑founder Jonathan Rees, and the man who took Daniel’s place, former “King of Catford” Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, went on to turn Southern Investigations into the hub of the dark arts — bribing police officers, hacking phones and computers, blagging financial and medical records, impersonation, surveillance and intimidation.

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