London: Shot Brazilian 'did not jump barrier and run'
http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht...ixnewstop.html
The Brazilian electrician shot dead by police on the London Underground last month was being restrained when he was killed by officers from Scotland Yard's firearms unit, according to documents leaked last night.
Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was shot seven times in the head by two plainclothes policemen who had followed him on to the train at Stockwell station in the mistaken belief that he was a potential suicide bomber.
http://telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics...7/nmenez17.jpg
Jean Charles de Menezes lies dead in the Tube train
Documents and photographs leaked to ITV News also confirmed that Mr de Menezes did not run from the police, as had been reported, had used his Tube pass to enter the station, rather than vault the barrier, and had taken a seat on the train before being grabbed by an officer.
He was wearing a light denim jacket and not as previously reported a padded coat which could have concealed explosives.
The documents, which contain witness statements made to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, also suggest that the intelligence operation may have been botched because an officer watching a flat believed to be the hideout of one of the suspects in the abortive July 21 attack was "relieving himself".
Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has apologised for the death of Mr de Menezes and a senior officer has visited Brazil to talk to his family. However, the latest disclosures will cast fresh light on Sir Ian's insistence that the death was the tragic consequence of a legitimate operation.
Shortly after the shooting, Sir Ian said: "Whatever else they were doing, they clearly thought they were faced with a suicide bomber and they were running towards him. Had that person been a suicide bomber and had the officers not fired and 25 yards up the track the bomb had exploded, the officers would be in a worse situation than they are now."
He insisted that lethal force was the only option available to his officers once they had satisfied themselves Mr de Menezes was a suicide bomber. Yet a few days later, West Midlands police used a Taser stun weapon to arrest Yasin Hassan Omar, one of the July 21 suspects. Mr de Menezes was killed the day after the failed attacks on Tube trains and a bus.
Guidelines issued since the September 11 attacks emphasise that police must not challenge suicide bombers or identify themselves for fear of prompting the bomber to detonate his device. Instead, they may fire a "critical head shot ? prior to challenge".
The complaints commission has taken statements from officers in the operation. Among the questions being asked is why the intelligence on the occupants of the flats suspected of harbouring the terror suspects failed to identify Mr de Menezes as an innocent party.
It will also seek to establish why he was allowed to board a bus when buses had been targets in the two previous attacks. His family cannot reconcile the police assertion that he had to be stopped once he had boarded a Tube train with the fact that he got on to a bus.
Questions will also be asked over why the impression that he was wearing a padded fleece was given continued credence when the photographs broadcast last night show him dressed differently. Wearing bulky clothing not in keeping with the weather is considered a sign of a potential suicide bomber.
Scotland Yard said last night that it was unable to comment on any reports about the incident while it was being investigated.
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Footage Contradicts London Police Reports
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050817/...NlYwMlJVRPUCUl
Press Statement from lawyers on the shooting of de Menezes
UK: Press Statement from lawyers on the shooting of Jean Charles de
Menezes on 22 July: Response to the evidence made public during the
last 24 hours as to the true circumstances of the death of Jean Charles de
Menezes Birnberg Peirce & Partners (Harriet Wistrich/Gareth Peirce), 17th
August 2005:
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2005/...se-17.8.05.pdf
[pdf text]
Press Statement #2
Jean Charles de Menezes
Response to the evidence made public during the last 24 hours as to the true
circumstances of the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Yesterday the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and we, their lawyers, became
aware through the press that virtually the entire body of information either placed, or
allowed to remain, in the public domain since Jean Charles de Menezes was killed on
July 22nd 2005, has been false.
Insofar as the claim of the existence of an official inquiry has contributed to or provided
for a situation in which a blanket of secrecy has covered the true facts, and lies and
false scenarios have been allowed to hold good, we on behalf of the family suggest that
claim has constituted a grave public disservice.
In consequence, we ask now that the nature and pace and ultimate objectives of any
investigation change. The de Menezes family ask for only one outcome and that that be
swift, that is that the entire truth surrounding Jean Charles death be made public now
as a matter of urgency.
The public interest coincides completely with the interests of the family. 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. It is inconceivable that the true facts as revealed yesterday,
were not made known to senior police and ministers immediately; for any to have made
comments publicly without first informing themselves of the true facts would have been
entirely reckless and wrong.
From the outset the family have raised a number of obvious questions
1. How was Jean Charles de Menezes first identified as a suspect and on what
basis?
2. Why was he allowed to board a bus without challenge if he was indeed a
suspect?
3. Why was he allowed to continue his journey unchallenged if he was a suspect?
4. Why was he allowed to board an underground train if he was a suspect?
5. When did police identify themselves to him and how?
6. What opportunities were afforded for alternative action other than execution?
7. What alternative means of incapacitating a suspect were available on that day; if
alternative means were not available why not, and if they were why were they
not used?
8. Where did a ?shoot to kill? policy emanate from and on what claimed legal basis?
What public debate and democratic accountability surrounded the coming into
being of that policy?
9. Why was the suggestion that five bullets were fired allowed to continue as a
public assertion, uncorrected, when there were eight (seven to the head)?
10. Why were members of the de Menezes family in the UK, having been made
homeless by the securing of Jean Charles? residence, placed inaccessibly in a
hotel by the police and the telephones in their rooms ordered to be cut off by the
police so that they could not contact Brazil.
11. Why did police officers actively lobby Brazilian officials here to dissuade Jean
Charles? parents (without a telephone in Brazil) from obtaining a second post
mortem?
12. Why was the pathologist at the post mortem conducted on 23rd July (at which
senior investigating police officers were present) told the following:
?This man?s death occurred as part of the emergency relating to the
planting of bombs on public transport in London. On the morning of the
22nd July 2005 he was pursued by armed police officers as a result of
surveillance. He was followed into Stockwell Tube Station where he
vaulted over the ticket barrier. He ran downstairs and onto a tube train
where it appears that he stumbled. The officers then immobilised him and
a number of shots were fired. At the present time I am not sure as to any
further details.?
13. Why was he not told by the time of writing his report on July 27th of the true
facts?
13. Why was he not told of the true facts which clearly by then must have been
available?
14. What CCTV footage from the outside and inside of Stockwell underground
station and from within the underground train exists? If there is none, why is
there none?
In the light of many of the questions above having been answered during the last 24
hours by information clearly already in the possession of the police, we emphasise that
we are unable to have confidence in any of the investigative processes that are now on
offer in this case. We point in particular to the failure of the police, in breach of their
statutory duty, to invite the IPPC to commence its investigations from the first moment
of the shootings on July 22nd. A fatal delay of several days, we understand, occurred
thereafter during which time we are unaware that the IPPC itself proactively attempted
to intervene. We have the gravest of concerns.
1. First that evidence may not have been appropriately retrieved by independent
investigators and may now have permanently disappeared. We point in
particular to the unresolved question as to whether any CCTV footage of the
station or the train does in fact exist and was retrieved.
2. We observe that a number of written statements by police officers in direct
contradiction to what was previously understood are being revealed through the
press; one in particular points to the fact that Jean Charles de Menezes was
never in fact, appropriately identified as a suspect from the time of his leaving
the house.
3. We do not know whether police officers who appear already to have made
statements in this inquiry have made statements under caution and are being
treated as suspects in relation to a proper investigation of an unlawful killing, or
are being treated instead as only witnesses and not suspected of any level of
involvement in what at its lowest must be gross negligence (a potential ground
for an accusation of unlawful killing).
4. We do not know at what levels police officers, including senior police officers,
are being interviewed and whether under caution or not. We do not know who is
being interviewed and by whom?
5. We do not know whether these include senior police, past and present who
appeared to believe, wrongly, that they were entitled to order a blanket ?shoot to
kill? practice.
In these circumstances, on behalf of the family, we suggest that a different, urgent, and
open inquiry and public debate take place. It is neither sane nor responsible to have
issues of such enormous public importance, as well as of such pain to the family
concerned, to be allowed to drift towards an unspecified date at an unspecified and
perhaps inappropriate hearing in the future which may too late consider itself to be too
limited in any event to consider the important issues that have to be raised here and
now.
We underline as a reminder, that immense public debate took place immediately after
the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. All of that debate took place and was
allowed to take place on entirely wrong factual assumptions. We are now in a very
different situation. Someone with official access has, it appears, been sufficiently
disturbed by that dangerous position, to make internal documents public. In these
circumstances, we and the family of Jean Charles de Menezes regard the action of
revealing those documents as a true public service and ask that that initiative not now
be undermined by renewed secrecy, delay and inactivity on the part of those with
responsibility for investigation.
Birnberg Peirce & Partners
(Harriet Wistrich/Gareth Peirce)
17th August 2005
Fear, Incompetence and Lies
Fear, Incompetence and Lies
August 17, 2005
Fear, Incompetence and Lies
The death of Charles de Menezes. RIP.
Every word of the initial police statements was a lie, even the part about putting seven bullets in the young man's head. (Three missed. One hit his shoulder. That left four in the cranium.) "Suicide by cop" turns out to be "murder by fuckup." "Heavy coat" turns out to be denim jacket; "jumped the turnstile" using his pass; and the only "running" de Menezes did was to catch his train before it could pull away.
They killed him out of their own panic, ill-training and loose operational discipline. Then they lied. Oh how they lied. In the most surveilled city in the Western World, somehow the video of de Menezes killing of all videos has up and disappeared. Imagine that.
DO NOT BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT WHEN IT TELLS YOU THINGS! It's all well and good for rightist defenders of the initial reports of de Menezes killing to forthrightly change their minds with new information, but how much sense does it make to trust the competence and good faith of the same state that killed Charles de Menezes with a grandiose project of liberation by invasion? The same institution (the state) that propounded blatant falsehoods on the day its agents killed Charles de Menezes propounds blatant falsehoods before and during the war you've trusted it to wage. Its unexamined press releases become the roundups of the "good news the MSM ignores." The same institution whose agents missed a proper handoff of Charles de Menezes' surveillance because the peeper was off taking a piss is the one you've sent to divide the sheep from the goats in a country they know even less about than their own. The same institution whose agents knocked an already subdued civilian subway passenger to the floor and blasted his head off you've trusted to man traffic control points in cities where we speak little if any of the language, to search the homes of people whose lives are locked doors to us.
The British government's job on that morning was to safeguard the life and liberty of Charles de Menezes, British resident. There is no recourse to, They had to play it safe to protect Londoners. He was one of the Londoners they were to protect. They failed and lied. They will always have powerful reasons to fail and powerful incentives to lie.
Posted by Jim Henley @ 11:07 pm, Filed under: Main
http://highclearing.com/index.php/ar...005/08/17/4543
