British Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed Friday the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, a confidante of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, in the wake of the News International phone-hacking scandal, DPA reported.
Cameron believed Brooks had taken "the right decision" by resigning on Friday as chief executive of News International, the British arm of Murdoch's News Corporation, Downing Street said.
Brooks is seen as one of the key figures in the phone-hacking scandal that led to last week's closure of News of the World, of which she was editor-in-chief from 2000 to 2003. She is also a friend and neighbour of Cameron at his Oxfordshire home.
"As Chief Executive of the company, I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we have hurt and I want to reiterate how sorry I am for what we now know to have taken place," Brooks said in a statement to staff.
"I have believed that the right and responsible action has been to lead us through the heat of the crisis. However my desire to remain on the bridge has made me a focal point of the debate," she added.
"This is now detracting attention from all our honest endeavours to fix the problems of the past."
Brooks rose in 2009 to the top of News International, which published the News of the World alongside continuing titles the Sun, the Times and Sunday Times.
Rupert Murdoch's son James, who is News Corporation's deputy chief operating officer, said the company would apologize in public for recent events.
"This weekend, News International will run advertisements in all national newspapers. We will apologise to the nation for what has happened," he said in a statement.
"We will follow this up in the future with communications about the actions we have taken to address the wrongdoing that occurred," James Murdoch added.
He said Brooks would still appear next week before a parliamentary committee alongside him and his father, who is the chairman of News Corporation, to give evidence over the phone-hacking scandal.
"(We) will speak to them directly about our determination to put things right," James Murdoch said.
Brooks will be succeeded by Tom Mockridge, the chief executive of News Corporation's Italian broadcasting arm, Sky Italia.
Murdoch reportedly rejected previous offers by Brooks to stand down in the wake of the scandal, over allegations that News of the World illegally accessed telephone voice messages, including those of a murdered teenage girl.
Brooks has denied any knowledge of phone-hacking practices used to access messages left for murdered Milly Dowler in March 2002, which took place under her watch.