British police investigating phone hacking re-arrested former Rupert Murdoch aide Rebekah Brooks yesterday and detained her husband, a close friend of Prime Minister David Cameron, reports said.

All six were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert course of justice

Ms Brooks and her husband Charlie were reportedly among six people arrested at dawn on suspicion of perverting the course of justice by officers probing the scandal at Murdoch’s now-closed tabloid, the News of the World.

“The co-ordinated arrests were made between approximately 5 a.m. (0500 GMT) and 7a.m. this morning,” London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

The 43-year-old Brooks resigned as chief executive of Murdoch’s British newspaper unit, News International, in July, ending a stellar career which saw her edit both the News of the World and its daily sister paper The Sun.

She quit just three days before being arrested for the first time on suspicion of the illegal hacking of mobile phone voicemails and bribing public officials. She has always denied any wrongdoing.

News International confirmed to AFP that two current “non-editorial” staff had been arrested, identifying one of them as its head of security, Mark Hanna, but declining to name the other.

The company and Ms Brooks’s spokesman David Wilson were both unable to confirm reports in the British media that Rebekah and Charlie Brooks were among those arrested.

Scotland Yard said they had detained a 43-year-old woman and a 49-year-old man at their home addresses in Oxfordshire, west of London but refused to confirm their identities.

It said the others arrested, also in the south of England, were aged between 38 and 48.

“All six – five men and one woman – were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,” it said. Ms Brooks and her husband, a racehorse trainer, live in a wealthy area of rural Oxfordshire near Cameron, who has described Charlie Brooks as a “good friend” whom he has known since his schooldays at the elite Eton College.