I've blogged several times about the police shooting, in July 2005, of Jean Charles de Menezes in London. The initial enquiry concluded that there was no basis for a murder or manslaughter trial, and so the prosecution which ended today was brought under Health and Safety legislation. The verdict was that the Metropolitan Police as guilty of endangering the public by its conduct of the operation. There will now be an inquest into Mr de Menezes' death - one of the verdicts available to an inquest is that of 'unlawful killing'.
Some of the evidence which has emerged from the trial again poses serious questions about why events on the day took the many turns they did to lead eventually to their fatal outcome. For instance, the BBC reports that, right at the outset (04:55) the Met's incident Commander on duty, while setting up the stakeout on their suspect's block of flats, issued an order that officers were 'to stop everyone elaving the building'.
Yet, when Mr de Menezes emerged from that building at 09:33, he was not only not stopped, but made a half-hour journey (including two bus-rides) through South London before entering the tube station where he would be shot. Bearing in mind that the main 'trigger event' for the stakeout was the failed bus-bombings of the previous day, this seems strange - both in terms of effective enforcement, and in relation to the order issued 5 hours previously.
There were also numerous communications failures along the way, including the fact that once the surveillance and armed-response officers went down into the underground system, they had no radio contact with the command and control system. Again, in the context of the 7/7 underground bombings, this seems another strange contingency to have failed to cover.
The Met's Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said that the case had produced no evidence that the shooting was the result of systemic failures, so he was not inclined to offer his resignation in the wake of the guilty verdict.
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