Robin Wilton's esoterica

I wrote several posts back in 2005 about the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and the extraordinary discrepancies which subsequent enquiries revealed between the versions of events put out be the police, and those subsequently found to be the case. For instance, this post from August 2005, at which time some of the initial factors cited by the police for their tragic decisions were already being called into question. Remember that, on the basis of those factors, the police's conclusion was that Mr de Menezes was a 21/7 suicide bomber on the run, that he represented the imminent threat of a large-scale attack on users of the public transport system, and that if they "were deployed to intercept a subject and there was an opportunity to challenge, but if the subject was non-compliant, a critical shot may be taken".

In some instances, it appears that the police acted on mistaken information or assumptions; for instance, they alleged that Mr de Menezes ran away 'because he was working in the UK on an expired visa'. That allegation seems to have evaporated in the light of scrutiny. As the recently-concluded coroner's inquest has established, the identification of Mr de Menezes was flawed: in part, this was for reasons known shortly after the event - a surveillance officer supposed to identify anyone leaving Mr de Menezes' block of flats was answering the call of nature at the critical moment. In part, it was (we now find out) because although clear, usable photos of the actual suspect were available to the police, they had not been distributed to the surveillance or firearms teams responsible for making the crucial identification.

In other instances, the discrepancies are less easy to explain away: the police initially alleged that Mr de Menezes' suspicious behaviour included running into the tube system and vaulting the ticket barrier instead of paying. CCTV footage revealed that to be a fabrication. Then, at the inquest, the jury returned a further damning decision: they acted on the evidence of civilian witnesses in the train at the time of the shooting, who directly contradicted the police assertions that Mr de Menezes had been verbally challenged before he was killed.

In other words, the operational order quoted above ("if the subject was challenged but non-compliant") was ignored. The non-compliance condition is absolutely critical here. Bear in mind that in making their plans, the police expected to be dealing with a suicide bomber, and might reasonably assume, therefore, that anyone they challenged could have some kind of 'dead man's switch'. The operational order implies that they were still expected to challenge a suspect, nevertheless, before taking a critical shot. As a result, the jury's verdict yesterday - even though the coroner restricted the verdicts he would permit them to deliver - came as close as those restrictions allowed to ruling that this was an extra-judicial, summary execution.

As Ian Hislop (editor of Private Eye, which has been covering this story since it began) said on Radio Five Live yesterday - the longer the police try to cover up the true details of an incident like this, the more the story is prolonged, the more likely it is that the truth will come out, and the worse the police look as a result.