Met chief tried to stop shooting inquiry

The Guardian
Aug. 18, 2005

Britain's top police officer, the Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair, attempted to stop an independent external investigation into the shooting of a young Brazilian mistaken for a suicide bomber, it emerged yesterday.

Sir Ian wrote to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, on July 22, the morning Jean Charles de Menezes was shot at short range on the London tube. The commissioner argued for an internal inquiry into the killing on the grounds that the ongoing anti-terrorist investigation took precedence over any independent look into his death.

According to senior police and Whitehall sources, Sir Ian was concerned that an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission could impact on national security and intelligence. He was also understood to be worried that an outside investigation would damage the morale of CO19, the elite firearms section working under enormous pressure.

"We did make an error, the IPCC should have been called in immediately," the police source said.

Later that same day, after an exchange of opinions between Sir Ian, the Home Office and the IPCC, the commissioner was overruled. A Whitehall insider said: "We won that battle. There's no ambiguity in the legislation, they had to do it."

But a statement from the Met yesterday showed that despite the agreement to allow in independent investigators, the IPCC was kept away from Stockwell tube in south London, the scene of the shooting, for a further three days. This runs counter to usual practice, where the IPCC would expect to be at the scene within hours.

It was also disclosed last night in documents leaked to ITV News that a soldier played a crucial role in the surveillance operation that led up to the shooting. The soldier was stationed outside a block of flats where police believed two terrorist suspects lived.

At a key moment in the operation, the soldier was in the process of relieving himself and thus could not turn on his video camera. "I could not confirm whether he was or was not either of our subjects," the soldier later reported, according to the ITV News documents. But he added to others in the surveillance team: "It would be worth somebody else having a look."

This appeared to set in train a chain of events in which Mr de Menezes was followed on to a bus and to the Stockwell tube station, where another two-man surveillance team identified the Brazilian to a police firearms squad. At the point of the shooting, seven undercover officers were all inside the tube carriage within metres of Mr de Menezes.

In a further puzzle, the soldier staking out the block of flats identified Mr de Menezes as he left the building as IC1 -police terminology for ethnic white. Yet the suspected Stockwell bomber had already been captured on CCTV and was known not to be white.

Scotland Yard was making no official comment last night, although senior sources stood by Sir Ian, insisting he had spoken in good faith about the shooting.

Harriet Wistrich, lawyer for the de Menezes family, said: "Sir Ian Blair should resign. The lies that appear to have been put out, like the statement from Sir Ian Blair, for instance, are clearly wrong. And nobody has stepped in to correct the lies.

"From the beginning, the most senior of police officers and government ministers, including the prime minister, claimed the death of Jean Charles to be an unfortunate accident occurring in the context of an entirely legitimate, justifiable, lawful and necessary policy.

"In the context of the lies now revealed, that claim has become even less sustainable and even more alarming."

Speaking from Brazil, Mr de Menezes's cousin, Alex Alves Pereira, said: "The officers who have done this have to be sent to jail for life because it's murder and the people who gave them the order to shoot must be punished. They should lock them up and throw away the key. They murdered him."

Mr Pereira added that both Sir Ian and Tony Blair shared the officers' culpability. "They are the really guilty ones," he said.

Whitehall sources disclosed that members of the army's new Special Reconnaissance Regiment had been involved in the surveillance operation. The precise role of the soldiers is unclear.

Whitehall officials said the operation had been "police-led" and that all the commands had been issued by police officers.

In the weeks since the shooting, Sir Ian has vigorously defended both the new shoot-to-kill policy as regards suspected suicide bombers, and the firearms officers involved in Mr de Menezes's death.

"Whatever else they were doing, they clearly thought they were faced with a suicide bomber and they were running towards him," he told the Metropolitan Police Authority on July 28. "That is cold courage of an extraordinary sort."

He insisted there was "nothing cavalier or capricious" about the operation, stressing the only way to stop a suicide bomber was to shoot him in the head, rather than risk setting off a device strapped around his body.

On the day, Sir Ian, who described the shooting as "directly linked" to the anti-terrorist operation, said: "Any death is deeply regrettable but as I understand it, the man was challenged and refused to obey instructions."