A BRIGHTON peer has called for a criminal investigation and public inquiry into claims the Met Police deleted files in a cover-up of illegal hacking into the emails of environmental and social justice campaigners.

Jenny Jones, Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, has been contacted by a whistleblower who claimed the force had been spying on hundreds of campaigners’ email accounts after officers had been supplied with their passwords.

The whistleblower claimed a secretive Met Police unit worked with Indian police who used hackers to illegally obtain the passwords for email accounts of campaigners, reporters and photographers over a number of years.

Ms Jones said the incident was one of the worst cases of “state snooping” she had ever heard, claiming the email account information could have been obtained illegally.

The Met Police said the allegations were “deeply troubling”.

Lawyers at Bindmans, acting on behalf of Jenny Jones and others at the centre of an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation into the shredding of personal files by the Met, approached six people on the list and verified the email accounts and passwords were theirs.

Ms Jones called for an immediate end to the police surveillance of non-violent campaign groups with no association to serious crime.

She added: “This illegal hacking by a police officer along with the collusion of officers within the Domestic Extremism Unit, is one of the worst cases of state snooping that I’ve ever heard.

“There is more than enough to justify a full-scale criminal investigation into the activities of these police officers and referral to a public inquiry.

“I have urged the IPCC to act quickly to secure further evidence and to find out how many people were victims of this nasty practice.

“It is completely unacceptable that the police can stick their noses into the lives of innocent people without a shred of evidence that they are involved in terrorism or serious crime.

A police spokesman said: “Whilst at this stage the allegations have not been thoroughly investigated, they are deeply troubling and the MPS will provide the IPCC with its fullest possible support.”