Murdoch's Sun publishes naked Harry photos, more could emerge

Prince Harry applauds during the Closing Ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012. (AP / Charlie Riedel)

Photos of Prince Harry engaged in a naked romp with a number of other young people in a Las Vegas hotel suite have caused a stir after being published back home in the U.K.

The Sun – a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper  – became the first publication in the prince’s home country to publish the nude pictures Friday.

“Heir it is! Pics of Harry you’ve already seen on the Internet” reads the front page headline along with a photo of the naked prince grabbing his genitals and bear-hugging a woman from behind.

The pictures circulated widely on the Internet after gossip website TMZ posted them earlier this week. The site reported the photos depict a game of strip billiards that took place after Harry and his friends invited some young ladies up to their room in Las Vegas.

In the U.K., most newspapers declined to run the pictures after St. James Palace reportedly asked that the media respect the prince’s privacy.

On Thursday, The Sun complied, but teased readers with a re-creation of the picture of the prince grabbing his privates. It featured a 31-year-old staffer standing in for the prince and a 21-year-old fashion intern standing in for the nude woman in the original photograph. The paper ran the recreation on the cover along with a headline “Harry grabs the crown jewels.”

However on Friday the paper took the decision to run the actual photograph on the cover, sparking a rash of complaints to the country’s Press Complaints Commission.

But the paper defended its decision on its website, where the photos are prominently displayed.

“We’ve thought long and hard about this,” managing editor David Dinsmore said in a video statement posted on The Sun’s website. “For us this is about the freedom of the Press. This is about the ludicrous situation where a picture can be seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world on the Internet, but can’t be seen in the nation’s favourite paper read by eight million people every day.

“This is about our readers getting involved in a discussion about the man who’s third in line to the thrown. It’s as simple as that.”

By Friday afternoon the story appeared to be growing rather than dying down, with British public relations guru Max Clifford saying he had been contacted by two women who claimed to have more nude pictures of the prince from the Vegas romp.

“They had lots of interesting things: pictures, video, that kind of thing,” Clifford told the Associated Press in a phone interview. He said he nonetheless declined the women’s request to help with publicity, as it constituted an invasion of the prince’s privacy.

- With files from The Associated Press