Phone Hacking Inquiry Widens to Times of London LONDON - The hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers took a new turn on Thursday when a lawmaker said police investigations had spread to the flagship Times of London. The revelation came a day after lawyers said an e-mail referring to "a nightmare scenario" of legal repercussions from widespread phone hacking at the News of the World tabloid was deleted from James Murdoch's computer less than two weeks before the police opened investigations. Tom Watson, from the opposition Labour Party, who has been a central figure in the inquiries into phone hacking, said in a message on Twitter that Scotland Yard had "confirmed to me they are investigating" The Times "over e-mail hacking." A spokesman for Scotland Yard, who spoke in return for anonymity under departmental rules, said officers investigating hacking were "in contact with Mr. Watson in relation to specific issues he wishes to raise" after he sent the police a letter on Jan. 23. But the spokesman declined to confirm specifically that The Times was under investigation. The development was significant in two regards: it focused attention on e-mail hacking rather than the illicit voice mail interception at the center of inquiries so far, and it suggested that the most august of the Murdoch publications in Britain was not immune from scrutiny. The case apparently was related to an episode in 2009 when a reporter who has since left The Times of London exposed the identity of a police officer who blogged under the pseudonym Nightjack, according to British news reports. James Harding, the editor of The Times of London, told a formal inquiry into press conduct last month that one of his reporters had been reprimanded for seeking "unauthorized access to an e-mail account," the Press Association news agency said. The incident led to a court case in which the police officer tried and failed to keep his identity secret. In his letter to Scotland Yard on Jan. 23, Mr. Watson said it was "almost certain that a judge was misled" in that court case and it was "clear that a crime has been committed - illicit hacking of personal e-mails," Press Association said. News International said it had no immediate comment on Mr. Watson's message. News of the widening inquiry came less than 24 hours after Linklaters, a law firm representing News International, the British newspaper arm of the Murdoch media empire, said the deletion from James Murdoch's computer was part of an "e-mail stabilization and modernization program" in which accounts were "being prepared for the migration to a new e-mail system." The e-mail was a chain of messages sent June 7, 2008, to James Murdoch - Rupert Murdoch's son who is head of News Corporation's European and Asian operations - warning that the potential legal fallout from hacking at The News of the World was "as bad as we feared." Linklaters disclosed the existence of the e-mail to a House of Commons committee investigating phone hacking in December. Mr. Murdoch said that while he received and answered the e-mail, he did not scroll all the way down through the chain and so did not read everything in it. The disclosure of the deletion came in a letter from Linklaters to the Commons committee. Operation Weeting, the police inquiry into phone hacking at The News of the World, began 11 days later. The letter also disclosed that the e-mail's existence became known only because investigators unearthed a hard copy from a storage crate filled with material left behind last summer when The News of the World was closed. A News International spokeswoman said the company had no comment and would not discuss what other e-mails might have been deleted at the same time. The e-mail has become significant in the hacking case as possible evidence of what Mr. Murdoch knew and when he learned it. Two company officials - Tom Crone, then a News International lawyer, and Colin Myler, then the News of the World editor - have said they informed him at the time that phone hacking was endemic at the newspaper. Three days after the June 7 e-mail, Mr. Murdoch met with Mr. Crone and Mr. Myler and decided to pay more than $1.4 million to settle a hacking lawsuit. The details of the suit were kept secret, and until December 2010, News International maintained that hacking at the newspaper was limited to a "rogue reporter." The Linklaters" letter said the crate in which the hard copy of the e-mail was found "had a sticker on it which suggested the contents were originally held in Mr. Myler's office." Electronic copies were then found in two of Mr. Murdoch's laptops, and one from an assistant's desktop computer, Linklaters said. Mr. Myler's copy, though, was "lost from the e-mail archive system in a hardware failure which occurred on 18 March 2010," the law firm added. News International has given varying accounts about what e-mails it has, where they are and why it did not immediately make them available to investigators. At one point, it said that its e-mail archive had been lost on the way to storage in Mumbai, India; at another, it said it could only retrieve e-mails that were less than six months old. But new intimations that the company may have purposely destroyed evidence are raising questions about whether the company might be investigated for obstruction of justice. A judge accused News International last month of destroying possibly relevant e-mails. And The Guardian reported Tuesday that the police were examining "an enormous reservoir of material from News International's central computer services" that was "deliberately deleted from News International's servers."