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LONDON: A phone-hacking scandal which brought down Britain’s mass-circulation News of the World tabloid threatened to ensnare Prime Minister David Cameron with Friday’s expected arrest of his former press chief.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch killed off the 168-year-old tabloid in a stunning move on Thursday as the spiralling phone-hacking crisis threatened to infect the rest of his empire and taint the country’s leader.

Andy Coulson, who was editor of the paper when the hacking was proven to have occurred, was told by police that he was to be arrested on Friday over claims that he knew about the hacking or was directly involved in it, the Guardian said.

Coulson—who was Cameron’s media chief until his resignation in January—was expected to be released on bail, it added.

In a fittingly sensational finale, the paper will print its last edition on Sunday after claims that it hacked the phones of a murdered girl and the families of dead soldiers, and that it paid police for stories.

“Having consulted senior colleagues, I have decided that we must take further decisive action with respect to the paper,” said Murdoch’s son James, chairman of News International, the British newspaper wing of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

“This Sunday will be the last issue of the News of the World,” he added.

The final edition would be free of advertising and proceeds would go “to causes and charities that wish to expose their good works to our millions of readers,” he said in a statement.

One devastated staff member said that the announcement went off like a “nuclear bomb” in the offices of Britain’s second biggest-selling newspaper, whose diet of kiss-and-tell stories sold 2.7 million copies a week.

Its closure sparked immediate speculation that Rupert Murdoch was offering the paper as a sacrificial victim to save his bid for control of pay-television giant BSkyB, which is the subject of an upcoming government decision.

The British Broadcasting Corp. quoted sources as saying that Murdoch would replace it with a Sunday version of The Sun, his daily tabloid, which is Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper.

Cameron said that the closure of the News of the World should not distract from an ongoing police investigation into the hacking.

“What matters is that all wrongdoing is exposed and those responsible for these appalling acts are brought to justice,” Cameron’s Downing Street office said in a statement.

He repeated his pledge to hold public inquiries into practices at the News of the World and into an earlier botched police probe into the issue.

Two hundred staff members of the tabloid, meanwhile, will lose their jobs and they have been told that they can apply for other jobs within News International.