The shocking truth behind shoot-to-kill

Panorama's investigation into the death of Jean Charles de Menezez leaves senior police chiefs with tough questions to answer

Published in the Evening Standard, 9 March 2006

No one will have enjoyed watching last night’s Panorama, which reconstructed the events leading to the police shooting last July of Jean Charles de Menezes. Not his family, who were shown bewildered by the death of a cherished son, a young man who had grown up in the dusty poverty of rural Brazil and who had come to London, like so many before him, to make his fortune – or rather enough money to send back home. Not the commuters who sat on the Tube at Stockwell that Friday morning, only to see an innocent man shot seven times before their eyes. And not Londoners, who for an hour last night were taken back to the tension and angst of that hot, fearful month.

But the most uncomfortable viewers will have been the police, whose conduct and serial mistakes on July 22 were laid bare so rigorously. The programme was made by Peter Taylor, a sober, meticulous journalist whose films on Northern Ireland have won universal acclaim: this was no police-bashing agitprop. On the contrary, running through it was a close understanding of the near-impossible situation the police found themselves in that day.

Nevertheless, the judgement it prompts is not kind. First, we learned that not once in the course of De Menezez’s 33-minute journey from Tulse Hill to Stockwell did the police stop or challenge him. Of course that would have been foolhardy when he was riding the bus, surrounded by other people: if he had been a suicide bomber, he could have blown himself up there and then. But why didn’t they stop him when he was on foot? From a distance, thereby protecting themselves, officers could have told him to freeze – even to undress, if that’s what it took to prove he carried no bomb. Perhaps he would have been humiliated, but he would be alive today – and none of us would know his name.

Second, we heard of the almost Keystone Kops incompetence that led police to be initially uncertain of the Brazilian’s identity and then to misidentify him as Hussein Osman, the man suspected of having left one of the previous day’s failed bombs at Shepherd’s Bush. Taylor stood up what many suspected was an urban myth: that the surveillance team missed the moment De Menezez left his flat that morning because the man charged with watching him had to take a leak. It turns out that man was an undercover soldier called Tango 10 – and he answered the call of nature when he should have been operating a video camera. Later a colleague radioed base to say he couldn’t confirm the suspect was Osman, but noted that he had distinctive “Mongolian eyes.”

Of course basic human errors are inevitable, especially in an operation like this one – scrambled together, on the hoof, with no time for preparation. But Panorama’s story featured more than error. There was also an allegation of criminal misconduct: the claim that Special Branch officers falsified the log recording the precise events of the day.

Nor can our masters shift the blame for July 22 onto incompetent or bent underlings. One of the key problems of the operation was that officers who entered Stockwell station had no way of communicating with their controllers back at Scotland Yard: their radios simply didn’t work underground. Former Met Commissioner John Stevens said he had previously lobbied the Home Office hard, demanding equipment that could do the job, but the government had dragged its feet. You’d think 7/7 would have changed all that, but no. Today’s police officers have hi-tech “Airwave” radios – but these still don’t work in the depths of the Tube system. The Home Office told Taylor contracts still have to be signed before the requisite infrastructure can be put in place. If ever there was proof that London needs greater power over its own affairs – so that the police, the Underground and the resources both need are under London’s own authority, no longer at the whim of central government – this, surely, is it.

More shocking still was the revelation that our specialist counter-terrorist forces are given greater leeway, and operate under looser rules of engagement, than the Israeli army. An Israeli police commander told Taylor his officers could only open fire on a suspected bomber if they could actually see a suicide vest or explosive belt. No such restriction operates on British firearms officers. If it did, De Menezez – who carried no bag and wore only a thin denim jacket – would not have been gunned down.

What it adds up to is a series of tough questions for this city’s most senior police officers, starting with the top man. Ian Blair will have to explain not only the series of missteps that took place on his watch, but the curious fact that he seemed to be one of the last to know that the Met had killed an innocent man – not till 24 hours after the shooting. He and his colleagues will have to face up to the findings of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, now being considered by the Crown Prosecution Service: they may even have to answer to a court, if that’s what the latter decides. That’s certainly what Jean Charles’s family want.

Others will have to draw the wider lessons. I hope they’ve already done so, whether it be ordering radios that work underground or adopting those more sensible Israeli rules of engagement.

Nevertheless, there is one principle that, despite the horror of Jean Charles de Menezez’s death, does not need to be reviewed: namely, that it is legitimate to take a life to save a life or lives. If police are certain – more certain than they were on July 22 – that they are looking at a ticking human bomb, poised to kill and maim, then they are right to do whatever it takes to stop him, even if that means shooting at the head. But that if is a big if – one that cost the life of an innocent man.

Posted on March 9, 2006 07:13 PM

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