LONDON: Rebekah Brooks, the former boss of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, was acquitted today of orchestrating a campaign to hack into phones and bribe officials in the hunt for exclusive news. A jury at London’s Old Bailey court cleared Brooks unanimously but found Andy Coulson, Prime Minister David Cameron’s former media chief and ex-editor of one of Murdoch’s British titles, guilty of being part of the phone-hacking conspiracy after a trial that has lasted nearly eight months. On hearing of her acquittal in court, Brooks looked stunned and drew a sharp intake of breath before being led away by a nurse. Wearing a white jumper and dark blue trousers, she later walked free from the court through a scrum of photographers, clutching the hand of her husband Charlie who was also cleared of any attempt to hinder the investigation. Brooks’s lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw had argued the prosecution failed to produce a “smoking gun” during her 14 days of intense questioning on the stand. He likened the authorities’ decision to take her to court over the charges involving the hacking of the phones of celebrities and crime victims to a medieval witch hunt. Both Coulson and Brooks were former editors of Murdoch’s News of the World, the 168-year-old tabloid the media mogul closed in July 2011 amid a public outcry over revelations that journalists had hacked into the voicemails on the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The scandal shocked Britain’s political elite, with prime ministers from both main parties shown to have been close to Murdoch and his senior staff including Brooks. Cameron ordered a public inquiry into press ethics in the immediate aftermath. The 46-year-old Brooks was cleared of being part of a conspiracy to hack into phones to find exclusive stories, of authorising illegal payments to public officials and of trying to hinder the police investigation.