Rebekah Brooks has told a UK court she had nothing to do with the hacking of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone and was left feeling "shock and horror" when she found out what had happened.
The former News of the World editor told the Old Bailey on Tuesday that she knew nothing about the tasking of phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire to access Milly's voicemails and only became aware of it on July 4, 2011.
Asked about her reaction when she found out, the 45-year-old said: "Shock, horror, everything.
"Just to put my reaction into any form of context, I was told that the News of the World had asked someone to access Milly Dowler's phone while she was missing, that they had also deleted her voicemails and for a period of time because of that her parents had been given false hope and thought she was alive.
"I just think anyone would think that that was pretty abhorrent, so my reaction was that. That was what I was told."
As Brooks returned to the witness box for the third day, jurors were told that 13-year-old Milly was reported missing on March 21, 2002.
Her disappearance was covered by the now-defunct tabloid in the following weeks, and the court heard that it had emerged that Milly's voicemails had been accessed between April 10 and 12 that year.
Brooks told the court that no journalist or desk head had come to her and asked her to approve the use of phone hacking to get stories while she was at the helm of the tabloid between 2000 and 2003.
Asked by her lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw QC if she had ever been asked to sanction accessing any voicemails as part of an investigation or any stories, she said "no".
"At the time, if you took my editorship of the News of the World at the time, I don't think anybody, me included, knew it was illegal," She told the court.
"No one, no desk head, no journalist, ever came to me and said ,'we're working on so-and-so a story but we need to access their voicemail' or asked my sanction to do it.
"It just didn't happen in the course of my editorship.
"Even though I didn't know it was illegal I still would have felt that it was absolutely in the category of a serious breach of privacy."
Brooks denies conspiring to hack phones, conspiring to commit misconduct in public office and conspiring to cover up evidence to pervert the course of justice.
