Jean Charles de Menezes – Page 4

Suprise, surpise! No CCTV of Menezes being killed

Published on August 16, 2005

CCTV footage was lost, The guardian reports:

Now an Observer investigation has raised fresh questions about the death of de Menezes, whose killing is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The Observer has discovered that a key element of the investigation will be scrutiny of a delay in calling an armed team to arrest de Menezes, which meant he had already entered the station by the time the officers arrived.

That delay was crucial. If the police thought de Menezes was dangerous – perhaps a bomber – the fact that he was already in the station would have heightened tension and increased the chances of something going wrong.

Evidence of this hold-up should have been provided by CCTV footage from dozens of cameras covering the Stockwell ticket hall, escalators, platforms and train carriages.

However, police now say most of the cameras were not working. Yet pictures are available of a bombing suspect leaving another station nearby, and after the 7 July attacks tube boses could have been expected to make extra efforts to see that all their cameras were in action.

The questions are mounting. Initial claims that de Menezes was targeted because he was wearing a bulky coat, refused to stop when challenged and then vaulted the ticket barriers have all turned out to be false. He was wearing a denim jacket, used a standard Oyster electronic card to get into the station and simply walked towards the platform unchallenged.

It has also been suggested that officers did not identify themselves properly before shooting de Menezes seven times in the head.

In the absence of CCTV footage the inquiry will have to rely on the testimony of eyewitnesses, though many of those who claim to have seen the incident have provided contradictory accounts of what happened.

Figures. Strangely enough, in an earlier Guardian article, it was reported that “Nick Hardwick, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian he had all the footage in his possession and it was “very, very helpful” to the inquiry“. Was Hardwick referring to the CCTV footage of the killing of Menezes and if so, what happened to it? If this footage existed on July 30th but not now, when did it disappear? Who disappeared it?

Menezes did not run: confirmed

Published on August 2, 2005

From the Sunday Times:

Gareth Peirce, one of Britain’s most prominent defence lawyers, is representing the family of de Menezes against the police. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is studying CCTV footage that caught de Menezes’s last moments. What is already clear is that the initial accounts of his death on July 22 were wrong.

When the shooting at Stockwell Underground station was first confirmed, a senior police source told reporters, off the record, that they had killed one of the would-be suicide bombers who was on the run after the failed July 21 bombings. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said that the shooting was “directly linked” to the terrorist operation.

The man, according to the police, was suspect because of his “clothing and behaviour”. He had been followed from a house that had been under surveillance. When he was challenged at Stockwell, he ignored instructions and ran. He had vaulted over the ticket barrier and was wearing a dark bulky jacket that could disguise a bomb.

One witness had de Menezes as an Asian with a beard and wires coming out of his torso. The truth is more mundane. De Menezes, an electrician, was travelling to north London to fix a fire alarm.

He was not wearing what witnesses called a “black bomber jacket”, but a denim jacket. It was about 17C and his clothing would not have been out of the ordinary.

He did not vault a ticket barrier, as claimed. He used a travelcard to pass through the station in the normal way. His family believes that he may have started to run simply because he heard the train pulling in — something Londoners do every day. Indeed, a train was at the platform when he got there.

Special chutzpah award to the unnamed police officer elsewhere in the article:

As one officer said yesterday: “They’ve done a good job for their country. But of course, they are very sad.”

Menezes did not run

Published on July 29, 2005

Nor did he wear a heavy coat, according to his relatives:

Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead in the head, was not wearing a heavy jacket that might have concealed a bomb, and did not jump the ticket barrier when challenged by armed plainclothes police, his cousin said yesterday.

Speaking at a press conference after a meeting with the Metropolitan police, Vivien Figueiredo, 22, said that the first reports of how her 27-year-old cousin had come to be killed in mistake for a suicide bomber on Friday at Stockwell tube station were wrong.

“He used a travel card,” she said. “He had no bulky jacket, he was wearing a jeans jacket. But even if he was wearing a bulky jacket that wouldn’t be an excuse to kill him.”

Ever since I first read this yesterday, I’ve been thinking about it. Imagine, you’re going to work, walking from your home to the bus, getting off at your local Underground station, use your travelcard to get into the station, you board the train that takes you to work –and all of a sudden you are grabbed from behind, thrown to the ground and before you even realise what the hell is going on, you are shot in the head. Seven times.

Not a nice way to day for poor Jean Charles de Menezes.

In the meantime, for all those who like to play blame the victim, the only thing left is that Menezes had overstayed his visa –if that’s an offense punisble by death, quite a lost of Ozzies in London must be feeling paranoid by now.

But what about his killer? He was sent on a well deserved holiday.

His superiors meanwhile are still in denial about the morality and necessity of this police, which so far hasn’t stopped any suicide bombers, is unlikely to stop any suicide bombers but did murder an innocent man for the crime of erm, not looking at all like a suicide bomber. In fact, police now say that they need not even give a verbal warning before they execute another “suicide bomber” like Menezes….

Police kill innocent man: the system works

Published on July 25, 2005

Seems to be the conclusion reached by the idiot below, as linked to by Avedon Carol (I’m not giving this moron a link myself):

Many people will take this time to second-guess the London police and British special services. They will note the tragic consequences of a shoot-first policy that killed an apparently innocent man just trying to get to work, although one would expect that an innocent man would have stopped when commanded to do so instead of running for the nearest subway car. The police themselves will now second-guess themselves when it comes to making split-second decisions that could mean death in either direction.

Debate on tactics has its place and its benefits, but when such debate comes, it has to take place in the proper context — and that context is the war which Islamofascist terrorists have declared on the West.

In its way, this shows the folly of treating captured terrorists as if they were POWs. The Geneva Conventions exist to prevent civilian authorities to make these kinds of choices. It forces nations engaged in warfare to clothe their soldiers in recognizable uniforms so that civilians do not face these deadly consequences. The death of Menezes shows the wisdom of summary executions of infiltrators, spies, and saboteurs during wartime in order to discourage their use. The use of deadly force on people in civilian life in part because of a poor choice of outerwear during a hot summer season directly relates to the kinds of attacks that al-Qaeda has conducted on civilian populations.

A healthy dose of blame-the-victim there, with some nice pseudo-macho talk about sacrifices the blogger himself is very unlikely to make. It’s the quintessential rightwing reaction to any incident in which the wrong people –i.e. not themselves or their friends– are victims of the state. I’ve seen a lot of people elsewhere as well saying Menezes was to blame for his own death for wearing bulky clothes and running away when armed people ordered him to stop –and here I thought the death penalty had been abolished in the UK, but apparantly an exception has been made for wearing warm clothing on what is allegedly a summer day.