Daily Mail accused of paying €50,000 for video

The Daily Mail has been accused of paying €50,000 (£35,000) to obtain video of one of the terrorist attacks in Paris that had been encrypted by French police to prevent it being made public.
Representatives of the Mail are then believed to have destroyed the original source material from the CCTV cameras inside the besieged Paris cafe to ensure no other media organisation could obtain it.
The video, shared 16,000 times since being published on 18 November, shows the scene inside the Casa Nostra in the seconds running up to and including the attack. It also reveals how one woman’s life appears to have been saved when the terrorist’s machine gun jammed as he tried to shoot her.
Freelance journalist Djaffer Ait Aoudia told Monday night’s edition of Petit Journal on Canal+ and the Guardian that the Mail representative had been told about the need for a “hacker” when obtaining the footage. Part of his film, shot secretly, shows a French speaker talking in English about a computer expert who is “going to come … in an hour …. like a hacker”.
The Daily Mail denies that the footage its representatives saw was encrypted and says it was never told that the film should not leave the premises.
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