Footage from Sky News showed the 38-year-old prince getting out of a taxi and entering the building.

At a hearing scheduled to last four days, the publisher of the Daily Mail tried to thwart the lawsuits brought by the youngest son of Charles III, the singer Elton John, or the actress Liz Hurley.

Exiled in the United States after leaving the monarchy with a bang in 2020, Harry and his wife Meghan were invited to the ceremony, but have not yet made it known publicly if they will honor the invitation.

The return of the "Sussexes" to the United Kingdom to attend the coronation has been the subject of much speculation in the British media in recent months, after the couple's virulent attacks on the royal family.

After a documentary aired on Netflix in December, Harry published in early January his controversial memoir entitled "The Deputy", in which he recounts his adolescence marked by drugs and alcohol and details the breakdown of his relationship with his father, King Charles III, and his brother William.

The king was originally scheduled to be absent from the UK on Monday and Tuesday for a state visit to France, which was postponed due to the social climate and sometimes violent protests linked to President Emmanuel Macron's pension reform. He travels to Germany on Wednesday.

"Grotesque defamation"

At war with the tabloids, Prince Harry blames the tabloid press for the death of his mother Diana in 1997 in a car accident in Paris, pursued by paparazzi.

In the legal proceedings in London, the six plaintiffs accuse ANL of employing detectives to bug them, in their car or in their homes.

They also claim that payments were made to police officers "with corrupt links to private detectives" to obtain information, that medical data was "obtained through deception" and that bank accounts and financial information were accessed "through illicit means and manipulation".

When the procedure was announced in early October, the group had refuted "totally and unambiguously these grotesque defamations which seem to be nothing more than a planned and orchestrated attempt to drag the Mail's headlines into the scandal of telephone tapping concerning 30-year-old articles".

The British press was shaken a decade ago by several scandals of illegal eavesdropping practiced since the early 2000s.

It was at the beginning of the case in 2005 of wiretapping in the mailboxes of collaborators of princes William and Harry but the emotion had peaked in the summer of 2011 when the tabloid News of the World had listened to the voicemail of a missing schoolgirl and finally found dead, Milly Dowler.

The revelations led to the crash closure of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's Sunday tabloid, which had paid two million pounds to Milly Dowler's family in an out-of-court settlement.

While many prominent figures have sued tabloids after being wiretapped, this is the first time such lawsuits have targeted the publisher of the Daily Mail.

© 2023 AFP