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| QUOTE | The Sunday Times August 21, 2005
Focus: Executed: Anatomy of a police killing
The real story of how an innocent man was shot by police is only now beginning to emerge. Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas investigates the accusations of incompetence and cover-up
The day after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police at Stockwell Underground station, his grieving relatives and one of his closest friends filed into a mortuary to identify his body. They found him covered in a thin sheet and his face, unmarked, was ghostly white.
Gesio de Avila, a friend and fellow worker, looked carefully over the body, confused by de Menezes’s peaceful repose. Where were the wounds from the seven bullets to the head that killed him?
“Every bit of colour had left his face, but apart from that it was normal,” de Avila said last week. “There was a bandage on his head behind his ear and when I looked closer, I realised what had happened. He had been shot several times in the back of the head. It was like he had been killed by bandits.”
De Menezes’s cousins, Alex and Alessandro Pereira, who were also at Greenwich mortuary in southeast London, were outraged by what they saw.
In their view, seven bullets into the back of the head, almost certainly at close range, did not seem like an appalling accident; it seemed like an execution.
“He was on the train with a newspaper on his way to work and they killed him,” said Alex. “He would never have run from the police. He was assassinated.” Ever since de Menezes’s death, those who knew him have felt a double injustice: both the untimely loss of a loved one and a refusal by the British police to acknowledge fully the tragic errors that led to his death.
Although the police soon admitted they had killed an innocent man, it was only last week that a proper account of what happened emerged. Leaked documents from the investigation into de Menezes’s death revealed a shockingly different version of events to the original ac- counts, including those apparently sanctioned by the police.
The documents show de Menezes was behaving normally when confronted; he never ran from police; he did not leap a barrier at the station; he was not acting suspiciously; and he was already being restrained by an officer when he was shot.
To compound matters, it also emerged that Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, tried to block an immediate inquiry into de Menezes’s death by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Late last week relatives of de Menezes accused Blair of misleading the public.
“The police knew Jean was innocent. Yet they let my family suffer,” said Alessandro. “For three weeks we have had to listen to lie after lie about Jean and how he was killed. The police even went to Brazil. Yet they still didn’t tell us the truth.”
Instead of facts, the police offered money: de Menezes’s parents claim they were offered possible compensation of £560,000, although this is denied by the police. The dead man’s mother angrily described it as “blood money”.
The controversy is likely to gather pace. It emerged last week that George Galloway’s political party, Respect, is jumping on the bandwagon by helping to galvanise demonstrations against police and government over the affair.
Battered by the allegations of a cover-up, Blair put up a robust defence. “I am not defending myself against making a mistake or being wrong,” he said. “But I am defending myself against an allegation that I did not act in good faith and I reject utterly the concept of a cover-up.” He adds in an interview published today that he did not know his officers had shot an innocent man until 24 hours after the killing of de Menezes.
But there was no escaping that the operation had been riddled with tragic errors.
SURVEILLANCE experts last week explained how a “textbook” operation against de Menezes should have proceeded. Undercover operatives watching a property, explained an expert who has trained MI5 officers and military teams, ought to form a surveillance perimeter known as “the box”. Their task is not to allow anyone to leave the box without being identified as their target or eliminated as not matching the target description.
“The second that the person watching the door — whom we call the trigger — says someone is on the move, then you want a positive identification,” said the expert. “It shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds, perhaps a minute or two at the outside.
“If the trigger isn’t sure, then you use someone else. You get them to walk by and get a good look at the target.”
Such a tactic means that the operative making close contact is “burnt” for the rest of the surveillance and cannot be used again for close work. But it is a price that must be paid for certainty.
“If you still haven’t got a positive identification, then you burn someone else,” the expert said. “Still not sure? Burn someone else. You can’t afford to let the target out of the surveillance box without a proper identification. It comes down to experience and good judgment.”
On the morning of July 22 — the day after unsuccessful bomb attacks on the London Underground — a surveillance team was watching a three-storey block of flats in Tulse Hill. They had arrived there after finding evidence in the rucksack bombs that had failed to explode on three Tube trains and a bus.
One had contained a gym membership card belonging to Hussain Osman, suspected of an alleged bomb attack at Shepherd’s Bush Tube station. In addition, the number plate of a vehicle spotted at a suspected terror training camp (believed to be in central Wales) had been tracked to the Tulse Hill address.
The building housed numerous flats. The suspect address was No 21 on the third floor of the block; de Menezes lived a few doors down at No 17.
Experts say the correct way to have monitored the address would have been to install a small camera in the block, covering the flat under suspicion. But that entailed a number of risks and on July 22 the surveillance team was relying simply on an officer, armed with a video camera, covering the communal entrance.
There was another potential weakness, too. The operation involved two surveillance teams and a unit of armed police on standby. In the teams were both police officers and specialists on secondment from the military. Such a mix can lead to friction, say police sources.
“I can’t imagine what we would want to use the military for,” said an officer trained in surveillance. “Some of our officers have 15 years’ experience, whereas a military operator would have only a few.”
According to well-placed sources, tensions between the police and the Army were running so high that army bomb disposal experts could not even find out the type of explosives used in the July 7 and July 21 attacks. “[The Army] wanted basic details of the bombs that the terrorists had used,” one defence source said. “The Met told them ‘mind your own business’.”
That day, the trigger man, codenamed Tango Ten, was a soldier who had been on secondment to the police for about a year. That morning, according to his own testimony leaked last week, he began watching de Menezes’s block at about 6.30am.
His task was to take footage of anyone who left it and compare it with pictures of the suspects involved in the failed attacks the previous day.
At 9.33am de Menezes emerged from the communal entrance. He was on his way to north London to help his friend de Avila fit a fire alarm. Tango Ten was caught off guard because he was “relieving himself” as de Menezes walked into the street.
The surveillance officer noted down his observations in a logbook. “I observed a U/I [unidentified] male IC1 5’8” dark hair beard/stubble, blue denim jacket, blue jeans and wearing trainers exit the block, he was not carrying anything and at this time I could not confirm whether he was or was not either of our subjects.
“I should point out that as I observed this male exited [sic] the block I was in the process of relieving myself . . . At this time I was not able to transmit my observations and switch on the video camera at the same time.”
In many features de Menezes was strikingly similar to Hussain, and surveillance experts say it would have been a difficult judgment as to whether de Menezes matched the description of Hussain. But one key indicator was his skin colour. The trigger man had described de Menezes as IC1, which is police jargon for light-coloured skin; yet Hussain was IC3 — dark-coloured. Despite this discrepancy, the surveillance officers following de Menezes remained suspicious. They followed him for the next half hour as he travelled north on a bus towards Stockwell, still trying to establish whether he was Hussain.
Their observations and radio transmissions were being reported to Gold Command in Scotland Yard where the officer in charge was Commander Cressida Dick, an Oxford graduate on the fast track to the highest echelons of the police service.
Dick, who trains other officers in dealing with serious incidents, was known as an experienced hand with a cool head and deft judgment. But that morning tension was high and nerves stretched to the limit.
London had just faced a second string of attempted bombings. The biggest hunt Britain had known was in full swing. Thousands of officers were deployed, many armed. Fears of another attack were running high.
Dick had to decide whether the man sitting quietly on the No 2 bus heading towards Stockwell was a potential suicide bomber.
At 9.47am her suspicions may have started to grow. At that point de Menezes got off the bus, waited for a few moments and boarded it again. Quite why de Menezes acted in such a manner is not known. But to the watchers it may have looked like an evasive technique to check if he was being followed.
It was also increasingly clear that de Menezes was heading for Stockwell Tube station — where three of the suspected bombers had set out the previous day.
Exactly what instructions Dick issued remain unclear. According to some reports, she ordered that the suspect be “detained” or “intercepted”. What is clear is that an armed CO19 unit that had been on standby began to move in.
Last week one senior police officer said a decision to call in CO19 would normally occur only when there was a high likelihood the suspect would have to be shot. The independent inquiry is likely to concentrate on the exact nature of the communications from that point between the surveillance officers, Gold Command, and the CO19 men.
As de Menezes walked toward Stockwell station, he had no inkling of the armed team closing in on him. He phoned de Avila and explained that he might be late for work because he expected delays on the Underground.
“I had called him about 45 minutes previously, so I wasn’t surprised to get his call,” de Avila said last week. “He was in the street and I think he was just about to walk into the station.”
As de Menezes walked into the foyer of the station, he picked up a copy of Metro newspaper. He passed his Oyster card across the ticket reader and descended the escalator. About halfway down he began to run — just as any commuter might to catch a train at the platform.
An officer of the surveillance team, codenamed Hotel Three, was close by. In an account provided to investigators, Hotel Three said he followed de Menezes into a train carriage.
“He sat down with a glass panel to his right about two seats in. I took a seat to his left-hand side on the same carriage and there were about two or three members of the public between me and the male in the denim jacket.”
When Hotel Three saw plainclothes CO19 officers arriving on the platform, he stood up and moved to the door of the carriage.
“I placed my left foot against the open carriage door to prevent it shutting . . . I shouted ‘He’s here’ and indicated the male in the denim jacket with my right hand.”
Under Operation Kratos, the guidelines to combat potential suicide bombers, armed officers were advised to shoot suspects in the head, without warning, to prevent them setting off their bombs.
But as the shouts went up and officers piled onto the train, such surprise was lost. It was obvious to de Menezes that something odd was happening, and he stood up and moved forward.
As Hotel Three later recorded: “He immediately stood up and advanced towards me and the [CO19] officers. I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso pinning his arms to his side.
“I then pushed him back onto the seat where he had previously been sitting with right-hand side of my head pressed against the right-hand side of his torso.” In the melee the police still saw de Menezes as a threat, even though he was now being restrained, perhaps negating the arguments for shooting to kill. Events, however, had taken on a momentum of their own.
“At this stage his body seemed straight and he was not in a natural sitting position,” recorded Hotel Three. “I then heard a gunshot very close to my ear and was dragged away onto the floor of the carriage. I shouted ‘police’ and held up my hands. I was then dragged out of the carriage by an armed officer who appeared to be carrying a long-barrelled weapon. I heard several gunshots as I was being dragged out of the carriage.”
Terrified commuters scrambled out of the train and fled from the platform. One of the last to leave said she saw an empty platform apart from four or five men in plain clothes. They were standing over the body of de Menezes.
Among de Menezes’s possessions were his driving licence and mobile phone. The name on the licence was nothing like that of the man the police were hunting — so almost immediately there were signs of a tragic mistake.
In addition, even as the Met commissioner was declaring that there were “direct links” between the shooting and the investigation into the bombers, de Menezes’s mobile phone began to ring regularly. It was de Avila. “I tried to call many times and sent him text messages,” he said. “In the morning it just rang and rang and in the afternoon it went to the message service.”
De Avila went to bed that night still not knowing what had happened to his friend. Then the police rang. “I was phoned in the early hours,” he said. “They contacted because my number had been on his phone.”
About an hour later a balding detective inspector and a uniformed woman police officer arrived at de Avila’s flat in Dollis Hill, north London. Over the next two hours, they questioned de Avila on everything he knew about de Menezes. “The detective wouldn’t tell me what had happened to him,” said de Avila, “but he said ‘we suspect this person is a terrorist suspect’.
“I told him, ‘It’s not true and I just don’t believe that. I know him. We have a social life together. He doesn’t come from Muslim peoples.’ I told him he was a Catholic.
“At the end, he showed me some pictures of Menezes. He said: ‘Are you sure this is the person we are talking about?’ I told him I was. He then told me: “Well, then, maybe this person is dead.”
De Avila’s testimony was convincing. De Menezes was from the same impoverished region of Brazil and was simply trying to save enough money in Britain to fund a business in his home country.
It meant that less than 24 hours after the shooting the police knew they had killed an innocent man. Yet they did nothing to quash misleading reports that the dead man had been a terrorist.
All police shootings are investigated — but Blair wrote to the Home Office asking for any independent investigation to be delayed. According to Blair this was because he believed his officers should not be distracted from the urgent hunt for the terrorists.
His intentions might have been good, but it looked less than open. A similar impression was given when Scotland Yard issued a statement the day after the shooting admitting de Menezes’s death was a tragic and regrettable error.
In the statement the police seemed to put forward a misleading element of justification. It said that de Menezes was followed by surveillance officers and his “clothing and behaviour added to their suspicions”. Yet he had dressed normally and behaved, apart from getting on and off the bus, like any other commuter.
There is not even a single police version of what happened. According to police sources, memebers of the surveillance team who followed de Menezes into the station believed he was not a threat but the firearms officers who arrived later tooka different view. If true, this could prove significant for any prosecution resulting from the shooting.
The family of de Menezes want to know why the Independent Police Complaints Commission did not take over the investigtion until July 27. Blair attended a high-level meeting at the Home Office two days after the shooting, and the family suspect he was still lobbying for an internal investigation rather than one by the IPCC.
This is denied by Scotland Yard. A spokesman said yesterday: “It had already been agreed by the time of that meeting that the Metropolitan police would hand over the investigation to the IPCC.”
Faced with the reluctance of police to provide a full account of the circumstances, the de Menezes family approached seasoned legal advisers and campaigners for help. Gareth Peirce, who represented the Guildford Four, wrongly convicted of being IRA bombers, was asked to represent them.
One of the family’s key advisers has been Asad Rehman, a founder of the Stop the War campaign who worked as a political assistant to Galloway in the last general election.
The Home Office’s action is one of the family’s sources of anger. Shortly after the shooting, it released a statement that suggested de Menezes had been in the country illegally. It seemed to give a possible reason for why he might have tried to flee from police. Later accounts suggested he had not in fact tried to run away, although it does now appear he was in Britain illegally.
Lawyers acting for the de Menezes family say they do not want his death to be in vain and believe it should be used to highlight the wider issue of the accountability to parliament of police protocol. They say a shoot-to-kill policy was introduced without the sanction of the politicians or the public. One reason Peirce is pressing for a public inquiry is that the IPCC findings are likely to be confidential for many months, possibly years, unless there are more leaks.
The commission says it will take three to six months to complete its inquiry and will then pass the file to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide whether charges are warranted against the firearms officers involved.
Meanwhile, although the Kratos guidelines are under review, the threat of suicide bombings remains — and so does the shoot-to-kill policy.
Source: Sunday Times Focus: Executed: Anatomy of a police killing |
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Articles about the murder of Jean Charles, Extra-judicial execution at Stockwell
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