Rebekah Brooks has quit as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's UK-based News International amid a widening scandal into phone hacking by journalists at the company's newspapers.

Brooks was the most senior executive at the company and is a former editor of both The Sun and the News of the World, the title shut down last week as a consequence of the scandal.

"This is quite extraordinary, because Brooks was considered something of a daughter, part of the Murdoch family," Al Jazeera's Tania Page reports from London.