LONDON: A senior British counter-terrorism police officer was jailed on Friday after becoming the first person to be convicted following a massive police investigation into alleged phone-hacking centred on Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers.

Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, 53, was jailed for 15 months for misconduct in a public office after she was found guilty last month of offering to sell details about the phone-hacking inquiry to Murdoch's News of the World tabloid.

“It was ... a corrupt attempt to make money out of sensitive and potentially very damaging information,” said Justice Adrian Fulford.Casburn called the News of the World on Sept 11, 2010, when police were at the early stages of examining claims journalists from the paper had illegally accessed the voicemails of mobile phones in a bid to find stories.—Reuters