A follow up to my diary published @BooTrib yesterday —
Breaking :: Documents Leaked on Menezes Death in London Subway ¶ Updated
Leaked report: Botched operation led to innocent Brazilian’s death
See MSNBC VIDEO of the fatal 30 minutes.
Britain’s top police officer, the Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair, attempted to stop an independent external investigation into the shooting of a young Brazilian mistaken for a suicide bomber, it emerged yesterday.
Sir Ian wrote to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, on July 22, the morning Jean Charles de Menezes was shot at short range on the London tube. The commissioner argued for an internal inquiry into the killing on the grounds that the ongoing anti-terrorist investigation took precedence over any independent look into his death.
More to follow below the fold »»
Death in Stockwell
According to senior police and Whitehall sources, Sir Ian was concerned that an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission could impact on national security and intelligence. He was also understood to be worried that an outside investigation would damage the morale of CO19, the elite firearms section working under enormous pressure.
“We did make an error, the IPCC should have been called in immediately,” the police source said.
Later that same day, after an exchange of opinions between Sir Ian, the Home Office and the IPCC, the commissioner was overruled. A Whitehall insider said: “We won that battle. There’s no ambiguity in the legislation, they had to do it.”
But a statement from the Met yesterday showed that despite the agreement to allow in independent investigators, the IPCC was kept away from Stockwell tube in south London, the scene of the shooting, for a further three days. This runs counter to usual practice, where the IPCC would expect to be at the scene within hours.
March 04, 2005 — New Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair (oh no, not another one! Any relation we wonder?) has only been in office for a month – and already he has caused outrage. Recently he was accused of wasting public money by his decision to spend a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds (£125,000) publishing an open letter to Londoners advertising himself, and wasting council taxpayers’ money.
[…]
However, it’s unlikely that he will do too much to antagonise the Police Federation, as witness his support for the two officers who killed Harry Stanley¹ when there was the aborsive SO19 firearms officers’ ‘strike’ recently.
November 8, 2004 — In an unprecedented action, up to 130 officers of the Metropolitan Police SO19 armed unit in London staged a two-day protest in which they refused to carry weapons. They were protesting a verdict of unlawful killing returned in the second inquest into the death of Harry Stanley, a painter and decorator shot dead by police in east London in 1999.
The deputy commissioner and commissioner designate of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, issued a statement in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper on November 3, 2004 which was published under the heading, “We must stand by our hero gun cops.”
Blair said, “If the Government is to review murder legislation then surely there must be a place for measures which protect armed police from the prospect of serious criminal charges and prosecution.”
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