LONDON — A senior police officer in Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command, Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, was sentenced to a 15-month prison term Friday for seeking cash payments from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid in return for information about a Scotland Yard investigation into phone hacking at the paper.

A unanimous jury verdict after a four-day trial made Casburn, 53, the first person to be convicted of a criminal offense in the phone hacking scandal that has enveloped Murdoch’s media empire in Britain. The judge told Casburn that she would have drawn a three-year term if she were not in the process of adopting a child.