The phones of Britain's Kate Middleton and Prince Harry were reportedly hacked by the staff working for Rupert Murdoch's defunct News of the World tabloid, a London court revealed on Thursday, Reuters reported.
Recordings of messages from Prince William to Kate were discovered at the home of the paper's ex-royal editor and a private eye working for the tabloid in 2006, Prosecutor Andrew Edis told London's Old Bailey criminal court.
"Hi baby, it's me," William, second-in-line to the British throne, said in one message read to the jury by Edis.
The message further revealed that William had nearly been shot with blank bullets after getting lost on a training exercise while at the military academy Sandhurst, Reuters reported.
The details of the call, including one in which he called her "babykins," were published as stories by the News of the World, the court was told.
William and Kate met as students in 2001 at St Andrew's University in Scotland. They got married in 2011 in a spectacular televised ceremony, watched by two billion people globally.
The court also heard extracts of transcripts of a message left on the phone of Williams's younger brother Harry in which an unknown male put on a high voice and pretended to be Harry's then girlfriend Chelsy Davy and called him "ginger."
The paper later ran a story saying the message was from William, according to Reuters. Royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were arrested in 2006 on charges of hacking the telephones of royal aides by accessing voicemail messages.
Both Goodman and Mulcaire admitted to the charges in 2007 and were sentenced to four and six months imprisonment respectively, Reuters reported. Along with six others, then-editor Andy Coulson is accused of a variety of offences including conspiracy to illegally intercept voicemails from mobiles. The charges have been denied by all of them.
Three senior journalists have also admitted conspiracy to tap phone messages, Reuters reported.
