Fri, 02 Nov 2007
Very good coverage by the
UK Liberty
blog of the Health and Safety trial of the Police in the shooting of
Jean Charles de Menezes:
Health and safety trial has begun
Health and Safety 2 - [armed officers point gun at policeman and tube driver after shooting de Menezes]
Health and Safety 3 - chaos in the control room
Health and Safety 4 - a question
Health and Safety 5 - the case for the defence
Health and Safety 6 - that defence opening statement in full
Health and Safety 7 - concealed explosives
Health and Safety 8 - officers changed their minds
Health and Safety 9 - surveillance officer Ivor was wearing a rucksack
Health and Safety 10 - bus users should not get back on the same bus
Health and Safety 11 - lethal force
Health and Safety 12 - more from the surveillance team
Health and Safety 13 - operation had “no structure”
Health and Safety 14 - blame the victim?
Health and Safety 15 - de Menezes was identified as not being Osman
Health and Safety 16 - blame the victim part II
Health and Safety 17 - alleged manipulation of composite photo
Health and Safety 18 - what does contain mean? shrug
Health and Safety 19 - control room wasn’t noisy
Health and Safety 20 - de Menezes had to be stopped
Health and Safety 21 - I told them to stop him, not kill him
Health and Safety 22 - “I didn’t expect a suicide bomber to emerge”
Health and Safety 23 - closing arguments
Health and Safety 24 - guilty as charged
Some of the allegations are recapped in the fourth
post:
- Police did not stop and question everyone leaving Mr de
Menezes’s apartment block, despite orders to do so;
- Armed officers did not arrive at the apartment block in
time to halt the Brazilian, despite the surveillance operation
beginning four hours previously;
- Without the armed officers, there was no plan for how to
deal with a suspect suicide bomber leaving the building. This
uncertainty helped create the confusion about Mr de Menezes’ status
that ultimately led his death;
- There was no plan for absence of certainty about identity;
- When one of the surveillance officers tried to clarify what
they should do if forced to “contain” the suspect, “all he got was a
shrug of the shoulders”,
- Senior officers believing that Mr de Menezes had been
identified as a terrorist despite the fact that no surveillance officer
had stated that to be the case;
- Police failed in their duty of care by letting a suspected
suicide bomber board a packed bus (twice) and then a busy Tube train;
- The New Scotland Yard operations room was too noisy and
chaotic for officers to accurately assess the information coming from
surveillance officers outside Mr de Menezes’ block, to the extent that
people couldn’t make themselves heard;
- Non-essential staff contributed to the noise and chaos by
not leaving the room despite repeated requests to do so;
- Surveillance officers who identified Mr de Menezes to armed
officers on the Tube train were unaware of orders that he should be
“stopped”, ie killed, before he could board the train;
- Commander Cressida Dick, Gold Commander at Scotland Yard,
issued a series of contradictory orders to the surveillance team
following Mr de Menezes;
- Somehow the firearms team made a leap from being in pursuit
of one terrorist suspect to a whole cell, which resulted in one officer
pointing a gun at ‘Ivor’, a surveillance officer, and another firearms
officer chasing the tube driver into the tube tunnel.
2007-10-06 FIRST PUBLISHED
