London, Nov 22 : Actor Hugh Grant has accused a popular British tabloid of illegally accessing his voice mails in 2007.

The ‘Notting Hill’ and ‘Bridget Jones''s Diary’ star implicated The Mail on Sunday, a newspaper not owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, in the wrongdoing.

During two hours of evidence before the Leveson inquiry, sitting at the High Court in London, Grant made several other new and startling claims about tabloid journalists’ methods, the Telegraph reports.

He suggested his flat had been burgled by someone working for a newspaper and that a third of the Metropolitan Police were taking “backhanders” from tabloid press.

Grant said that in February 2007 the Mail on Sunday ran an article claiming that his relationship with Jemima Khan was on the rocks “because of my persistent late-night flirtatious phone calls with a plummy voiced female executive of Warner Studios”.

He said the story was not only untrue, but “bizarre” and the “penny dropped” when he realised that an assistant at a production company associated with Warner who “had a voice that can only be described as plummy” often phoned him to leave work-related messages.

The actor was, however, forced to admit that he had no direct evidence to support his claims, which have been dismissed by the Mail as “mendacious smears driven by his hatred of the media”.

The Mail on Sunday immediately issued a statement denying the allegation.

“In the case of the story Grant refers to the information came from a freelance journalist who had been told by a source who was regularly speaking to Jemima Khan,” the paper said in a statement. (ANI)