(Updates with group raising provision by 16 million pounds)
By Estelle Shirbon
LONDON, May 21 (Reuters) - Eight mostly celebrity victims ofphone-hacking won a total of 1.2 million pounds ($1.9 million)in damages from Britain's Trinity Mirror newspaper group onThursday in a court ruling likely to raise the cost of dealingwith any future claims.
The owner of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror tabloidssaid it had raised its provision to deal with the fallout fromphone-hacking by 16 million pounds in addition to the 12 millionpounds it had already set aside.
The victims awarded damages were actress Sadie Frost,retired footballer Paul Gascoigne, BBC executive Alan Yentob,three TV soap opera actors, a TV producer and a flight attendantwho had dated former England footballer Rio Ferdinand.
The awards were larger than those obtained by otherclaimants in earlier out-of-court settlements and could lead toa sharp rise in the cost of dealing with future cases. TrinityMirror said it was considering an appeal against the ruling.
"As the legal process has taken longer and the costs ofsettling claims is likely to be higher than previouslyanticipated, we are increasing our provision to deal withmatters arising from phone-hacking," it said in a statement.
"The Board is confident that the exposures arising fromthese historic events are manageable."
Trinity Mirror shares were down 4 percent at 1230GMT.
The eight claimants sought damages after reporters seekingscoops listened to their voicemail messages, leading in somecases to salacious stories and to the victims suspecting thoseclose to them of leaking information to reporters.
Frost was awarded 260,250 pounds, Gascoigne 188,250 poundsand Yentob 85,000 pounds.
Frost said after the ruling that during the period whenstories were appearing about her and she did not yet know herphone was being hacked, she had been unable to trust those closeto her including her own mother.
"When you lose trust in your friends and family it is a verylonely place to be," she said.
"SCORES" MORE CASES
Frost's award was believed to be the single biggest privacydamages payout since the phone-hacking scandal broke, accordingto the Guardian newspaper.
Lawyer Christopher Hutchings, who represented Ferdinand'sex-girlfriend Lauren Alcorn in the case, told the BBC there werenumerous other claims in the pipeline and he expected TrinityMirror's costs would escalate.
"We're certainly personally aware of scores of clients thatwe have waiting in the wings," Hutchings said.
The ruling was the first time that a civil lawsuit relatedto phone-hacking has been decided by a judge. Previous damagesclaims against both Trinity Mirror and Rupert Murdoch's News UKgroup were settled out of court.
It may make it harder for newspaper groups to settle othercases out of court if claimants think they will get a biggeraward from a judge.
The phone-hacking scandal erupted in 2011 when it wasrevealed that some staff at Murdoch's News of the World tabloidhad routinely listened to private voicemail messages to generatescoops, prompting Murdoch to shut down the 168-year-old paper.
Police have been conducting a vast investigation intophone-hacking and other suspected illegal practices by tabloidnewspapers. At first the focus was mostly on Murdoch's titles,but it later widened to the Trinity Mirror newspapers.
The group has said it is cooperating with the MetropolitanPolice Service investigations.
(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; editing by Stephen Addison)