The brother of convicted Met Police detective April Casburn believes his sister would have been celebrated instead of jailed if her case had been heard in the United States.

She strongly denies asking for money when she approached the paper in September 2010, telling Southwark Crown Court she wanted to expose the diversion of police resources from the counter-terrorism division into a new phone-hacking investigation.

“The feedback I get from the USA is that had any senator done what Prescott did, he would have been the one that had gone and the policeman who reported it would have been celebrated for protecting the United States on September 11 from terrorist attacks,” Phillip Casburn told Press Gazette.