Lawyer Mark Lewis says he has been contacted by three people since airing of Panorama exposé of Mazher Mahmood

Three more potential victims of the former News of the World reporter Mazher Mahmood contacted lawyers within hours of the Panorama programme that revealed his face being aired, the Guardian has learned.

Fake Sheikh: Exposed was finally shown on BBC One on Wednesday night after being delayed by legal wrangling over the documentary’s allegations of corrupt practices by the investigative journalist.

Mark Lewis, the lawyer who represented scores of celebrities in phone-hacking claims, told Panorama he was representing eight potential victims of Mahmood. These include the former soap star John Alford and former Page 3 model Emma Morgan, both of whom gave interviews to BBC reporter John Sweeney.

Lewis told the Guardian on Thursday he had been contacted by three more potential victims of Mahmood since the show was aired.

Lewis told the Panorama show: “The damage [the alleged entrapment has] caused, the damage to people’s livelihoods, the amount of people sent to prison – it’s much, much bigger, far more serious, than phone hacking ever was.”

On Thursday morning, Lewis told the Guardian how people could be swayed by the kind of entrapment alleged to have been carried out by Mahmood: “All human beings have a price. If somebody came to me today – provided they weren’t wearing Arab headdress – and said the approach was on behalf of News Corp and … they wanted an ethical lawyer to come in and check they weren’t doing anything wrong, and there was a £5m sign-up fee, I’d probably do due diligence.”

In July, Mahmood was suspended by the News of the World’s replacement title, the Sun on Sunday, owned by News UK, following the collapse of a trial involving the singer and former X-Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos.

The judge in the case suggested that Mahmood had attempted to persuade a witness to change his evidence and then lied about it under oath. Mahmood has denied acting improperly and says that Panorama’s account of events is wrong and misleading.

There is an ongoing investigation into this case but the Crown Prosecution Service has not yet brought charges. Mahmood claims he used legitimate investigatory methods, which helped secure about 100 convictions during his 30-year career, largely by posing as Arab royalty.

The programme also alleged that a murder inquiry in 1999 revealed links between corrupt police officers, a firm of private detectives called Southern Investigations and tabloid journalists including Mahmood.

One document seen by Panorama said: “Source met Maz, a News of the World reporter … on this occasion Maz was with a plainclothes officer … The officer was selling a story to Maz.”

Mahmood insists he has never bought stories from police officers. But Panorama has been told that evidence suggesting that a number of tabloid journalists could be paying police officers should have led to a full-scale inquiry, but did not. Several trials involving former tabloid journalists accused of paying public officials are ongoing.

The documentary, Fake Sheikh: Exposed, also alleges that the police and prosecutors knew about Mahmood’s methods but failed to investigate properly, raising questions over the relationship between the police and the News of the World, where Mahmood made his name from 1991 until its closure in 2011, winning several national press awards.

The 30-minute documentary heard from alleged victims of Mahmood and former colleagues who accuse him of “criminal” acts. Alford, a former child star in Grange Hill, told Panorama that he thought of suicide after the Mahmood story. “No one can give me the 18 years I’ve lost, no one can give me that back. I hope this is the first day of a new life for me.”

His testimony came after the show’s producers broadcast archive footage from the News of the World itself in which Mahmood, dressed as a rich Arab prince, laughed with his colleagues about the impact of the story on Alford’s life.

In 1999 Alford, a recovering addict, was convicted of supplying drugs to Mahmood, and subsequently jailed for nine months. Even at his trial, Alford said he was set up.

In the programme, former Page 3 model Emma Morgan describes how she thought she was being offered a lucrative contract for a Middle East bikini calendar when she was 24, but instead fell victim to Mahmood’s desire to expose her as a drug dealer. Put under pressure to supply cocaine by a man called Billy employed by Mahmood, she did so.

Steve Grayson, who worked with Mahmood on numerous stories in the 1990s including this one, said of the takedown: “He is a drug dealer, we’re drug dealers, we have paid this guy to supply the drugs to give to her.”

Billy told Panorama: “I’d like to apologise to Emma for my part in stitching her up. The only real criminal was Mazher Mahmood. He gave me the money to buy the cocaine.”

Morgan said: “I was a fool, I was naive; to be foolish isn’t a crime, to be naive isn’t a crime, to do what he did is criminal.

“I haven’t had the career I should have had, I haven’t had the life I should have had. He’s a horrible, horrible man,” she added.

The programme also explored the supposed plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham and her children, which led to armed police arresting a gang of five men. In 2002, the News of the World reported that Mazher Mahmood had stopped the “crime of the century”, but the Panorama reporter John Sweeney described how one of the kidnap gang, a convicted criminal called Florim Gashi, was being paid thousands of pounds to work with Mahmood. When the prosecution discovered Gashi had been paid by the News of the World and lied about it, the case collapsed. Five men had spent seven months in prison on remand.

Mahmood denies the kidnap plot was invented but the judge was so troubled by the payment to Gashi that he referred it to the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who after taking legal advice found there was nothing he could do.

“The fact that somebody who has been accused by a judge of apparently not telling the truth may be instrumental in those convictions would certainly be a reason to look at those convictions again and to examine them to see whether they are safe,” Goldsmith told Panorama.

Three of the five men involved in the kidnap plot are said to have contacted Lewis after spending time in prison for their involvement in the story.

Panorama also alleged that Mahmood told detectives he got information from prostitutes and drug addicts before going on to say: “I’ve got bent police officers that are witnesses, that are informants.”

Mahmood said any criticism of him came from those he had exposed or people he had worked with who had an axe to grind. He tried to block the programme, citing the need to remain anonymous for security reasons, the threat of criminal action as well as the credibility of the Panorama witnesses.

The “fake sheikh” will soon learn if he is to face charges following the collapse of the Contostavlos trial. He denies perjury and perverting the course of justice. Already three cases based on his evidence have been dropped.

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