However, the police were not able to give a conclusive answer as to whether or not any messages on the phone were manually deleted.
© Rex Features / Jeff Blackler
© PA Images
The Leveson Inquiry was read a statement today (May 9) from police regarding the hacking of Dowler's phone.
The police said that there was no evidence of any journalist attempting to hack the voicemails before March 26, 2002. Dowler went missing on March 21 and her body was found on September 18.
Call data for March 26 is incomplete, and technical issues relating to the voicemail has given a less-than-clear picture of what happened.
On that day, Dowler and other consumers' voicemails were migrated from One2One to T-Mobile. There were also two PIN resets on the phone to allow police access, and the commissioning of an independent phone company by Surrey Police to download messages.
"We cannot conclusively say whether any voicemails were or were not manually deleted," the Metropolitan Police statement read to Leveson.
Dowler's phone was put into a "preserved state" on March 26 to prevent the automatic deletion of voicemails.
When the Surrey Police carried out their second recorded download on April 17, the phone was still in this state, and two messages were missing.
A message left on March 26 at 14.10 was shown as "saved" rather than "new", for reasons unconfirmed.
A message downloaded on March 26 was was no longer present on the second download, as was an expected message left on April 1 at 14.16. Again, it is not conclusively known why this was.
In The Guardian's initial reporting on the issue, it was claimed that journalists working for News International had deleted messages to free up space for more to be added, giving false hope to her family that she was still alive.
"The messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly's disappearance in order to free up space for more messages," the initial report in July 2011 read.
"As a result, friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive. Police feared evidence may have been destroyed."
However, it was later suggested that the messages were deleted automatically by Dowler's phone provider 72 hours after they were accessed.
The Guardian, News International and the Dowler family followed with their own statements to Leveson on the matter.
