LONDON - Prince Harry said phone-hacking was carried out on an industrial scale across the British press, and he would feel a sense of injustice if the High Court in London ruled he had not been a victim.

Prince Harry, the first senior British royal to give evidence in court for more than 130 years, was being grilled in the witness box for a second day on Wednesday over his allegations that tabloids had used unlawful means to target him since he was a child.

The Prince was more combative in sometimes testy exchanges on Wednesday with Mr Andrew Green, the lawyer for Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, which he and 100 others are suing over allegations of unlawful acts between 1991 and 2011. They are claiming during the seven-week trial that senior editors and executives at MGN knew about and approved of phone-hacking and have instructed private investigators to obtain information by deception.

Mr Green said there was no mobile phone data to indicate that Prince Harry had been the victim of phone-hacking and contrasted it with a 2005 police investigation that led to the conviction of the former royal editor at Mr Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct News of the World paper.

“If the court were to find that you were never hacked by any MGN journalist, would you be relieved or would you be disappointed?“ Mr Green asked the Prince, the fifth-in-line to the throne.

Prince Harry replied: “That would be speculating... I believe phone-hacking was on an industrial scale across at least three of the papers at the time, and that is beyond doubt.

“To have a decision against me and any other people that come behind me with their claims, given that Mirror Group have accepted hacking... yes, I would feel some injustice,” he said.

In response to Mr Green’s suggestion that the Prince wanted to have been a victim, Prince Harry replied: “Nobody wants to be phone hacked.”

The last time a British royal was questioned in court was in 1891, when the future Edward VII, the prince’s great-great-great grandfather, was a witness in a slander trial over a card game.

MGN, now owned by Reach, has previously admitted its titles were involved in phone-hacking – the illegal interception of mobile voicemails – settling more than 600 claims, but Mr Green has said there was no evidence Prince Harry had ever been a victim.

He argued that some of the personal information had come from, or was given with the consent of, senior Buckingham Palace aides.

In reference to one article about him not being allowed to return to combat in Afghanistan, Prince Harry said: “It is suspicious that so much is attributed to a royal source.”

In his 50-page written witness statement and in questioning, Prince Harry has said the press had blood on its hands, destroyed his adolescence, ruined relationships with friends and girlfriends, and sowed paranoia and mistrust since 1996 when he was a schoolboy.

He also broke royal protocol to say he believed the British government as well as the media had hit “rock bottom”, while his anger at suggestions his mother, Princess Diana, was a victim of phone-hacking before her death in 1997 was also clear.

Mr Green, who had described some of the Prince’s allegations as “total speculation”, quizzed him in detail over 33 newspaper articles whose details Prince Harry claims were obtained unlawfully and many of which related to his relationship with former girlfriend, Ms Chelsy Davy.

Prince Harry said intimate details reported about their break-up and arguments about him visiting a strip club had been obtained by phone-hacking, while Mr Green suggested these had been widely reported previously elsewhere.

“This process is as distressing for me as it is for her,” Prince Harry said.

As he wrapped up almost 7 ½ hours of questioning, Mr Green asked him whether it was the Prince’s case that his phone had been consistently hacked on a daily basis over a 15-year period.

“It could’ve been happening on a daily basis, I simply don’t know,” Prince Harry replied. Asked if there was any evidence he had been hacked, the Prince said: “That’s part of the reason why I’m here.” REUTERS