A leading tabloid journalist has joined those suing the News of the World for allegedly hacking into voicemails, reviving claims that the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper has been spying on its rivals to steal their stories.

According to the high court registry, Fleet Street veteran Dennis Rice has issued proceedings against the NoW and its private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Rice, who is now freelance, was the investigations editor at the Mail on Sunday (MoS) when Mulcaire was at the peak of his activity between 2005 and 2006.

A source familiar with Mulcaire's activities claims that, acting on orders from an NoW editorial executive, he intercepted voicemail messages from Rice and half a dozen other journalists at the MoS. They say that among other targets, the paper was keen to steal stories that Rice was filing from Germany, where England were playing in the World Cup in the summer of 2006, generating tabloid interest in the players' wives and girlfriends.

The same source said that by hacking into voicemails, Mulcaire obtained a password which would have allowed him to access the MoS internal computer system, potentially disclosing all of its email traffic and every story awaiting publication.

Some journalists who have worked for the NoW claim they were also attempting to penetrate the security of the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the People.

If proved, the claim could break the alliance of silence which has seen most Fleet Street papers refuse to investigate the scandal. Rice's legal action is only the latest in a number of indications that the claim may be correct.

The original police inquiry in 2006 found evidence that Mulcaire had succeeded in intercepting the voicemail of the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks. The current police inquiry is believed to have discovered that Mulcaire also targeted the Sun's former editor and columnist Kelvin MacKenzie. Both would have been rich sources of intelligence about the Sun's activities.

When he was tried in January 2007, Mulcaire admitted intercepting messages from the phone of the celebrity PR agent Max Clifford, who was boycotting the NoW and selling stories to its rivals. Clifford's former personal assistant Nicola Phillips is suing Mulcaire and the NoW for allegedly intercepting her messages.

As one apparent example, notes kept by Mulcaire suggest his hacking of Phillips's voicemail allowed the theft in February 2006 of a story about an alleged affair between the actor Ralph Fiennes and a Romanian singer, Cornelia Crisan, which Phillips had sold for £35,000 in a joint deal with the Sunday Mirror and the Mail on Sunday, but which nevertheless turned up in the NoW.

Rice himself was at the centre of a controversy 12 years ago, when he was deputy news editor of the Sunday Mirror. According to allegations made in the high court in August 1999, Rice had been contacted by Neville Thurlbeck of the NoW, who had asked to meet him in a south London pub. Rice had been suspicious and gone to the meeting with a concealed tape recorder. He allegedly captured on tape Thurlbeck offering him a weekly payment of £5,000 for the Sunday Mirror's news list, plus a bonus of £3,000 for any story from the list which made a front-page NoW splash. Rice rejected the offer and took the recording to his editor.

The Sunday Mirror went to court seeking an injunction to order the NoW to stop trying to bribe its staff. The NoW denied Thurlbeck had attempted to bribe Rice and claimed the Sunday Mirror had approached one of its journalists in search of information. The case was settled out of court with the Sunday Mirror's then editor, Colin Myler, publicly denouncing the NoW and accusing it of lying. Myler now edits the NoW.

That case followed two earlier embarrassing disclosures after Piers Morgan stopped editing the NoW in 1995 and moved to the Daily Mirror.

Soon afterwards, its sister papers, the Sunday Mirror and the People, both discovered their news lists were being secretly sold to the NoW by a senior Sunday Mirror reporter and a secretary on the People. Both papers said they had been aware that some of their supposedly exclusive stories had found their way into the NoW.

Rice's wife and sister are also named in the high court registry as claimants, suggesting their phones may also have been hacked. Rice's solicitor, Mark Lewis, of Taylor Hampton, said: "I can confirm that Dennis Rice has issued proceedings in relation to allegations that his voicemails were intercepted." We are currently awaiting a response from the News of the World.