Subscribe"Police were staking out the red-brick block of flats in Scotia Road, London, after the address had been found in documents left in one of the rucksacks abandoned after the failure of last Thursday's attacks.
There was also evidence that the crop-haired bomber in the sweatshirt with a New York logo on the front, seen in CCTV pictures fleeing Oval station, had recently stayed at the address.
There are eight separate flats in the block. When Mr de Menezes emerged from the communal front door just after 9.30am, the police must have realised from the photographs they carried that he was not one of the four bombers.
Even so, they decided that he was "a likely candidate" to follow because of his demeanour and colour, so one group set off on foot after him.
As he waited at a nearby bus stop, the reconnaissance team sought urgent instructions on whether to challenge him or let him board a bus....The decision was taken to let him go, in the hope he might lead his shadows to the bombers....When it was obvious he was getting off at Stockwell Tube station, the team on the bus alerted a three-man team of marksmen to move in. "
"The bus journey was slow, as on any other Friday morning, but Mr Menezes seemed to be in no hurry. He was heading to Willesden Green to fix an alarm system."And, from the same Times Online UK article :
"As the three plain-clothes officers closed in on Mr Menezes, they say that they screamed their first warning that they were armed police. Their version is that he turned, ran into the station concourse, vaulted the ticket barriers and reached a waiting train before they could catch him. They shot him five times in the head when they believed that he was trying to trigger a bomb."Obviously, the investigation is turning up contrary evidence.
"He insists the shoot-to-kill policy is the 'least worst' way of tackling suicide bombers and refuses to rule out other innocent people being shot in similar circumstances. 'I am not certain the tactic we have is the right tactic, but it is the best we have found so far.'"Here's a hint: How about look around a little harder for a better tactic before your officers redecorate a tube station with another innocent's brains (or shoot dead an "Irishman with a gun"), huh?
Stunned commuter Mark Whitby was reading a paper on the Victoria line northbound train when it pulled in to Stockwell.So, if as it now seems the armed officers had not challenged him before he got on the platform and only went after him once inside the station and the decision to shoot had already been taken, then it's a whole other story and if there was running onto the train it was not a cause of the police actions, but a last minute reaction itself, obviously.
When the doors opened he saw Mr Menezes burst in with cops behind.
"He kind of tripped and fell and three plain-clothed policemen fell on top of him," said Mr Whitby, a 47-year-old surveyor from Brixton.
"Two of them pushed him to the ground then they unloaded about five shots from close range."
The British capital has more surveillance cameras monitoring its citizens than any other major city in the world. The highly visible gadgets are posted on the corners of many buildings, on new buses and in every subway station. . .In all, there are at least 500,000 cameras in the city, and one study showed that in a single day a person could expect to be filmed 300 times.(Which is, of course, not to say that the US is not absolutely crammed full of surveillance cameras as well...)
By far the most controversial claim is from several witnesses who cast doubt on police statements that they shouted a warning or identified themselves before firing.Another main point of the article is to reveal 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. This is a matter of internal procedure.
Lee Ruston, 32, who was on the platform, said he did not hear any of the three shout "police" or anything like it. Mr Ruston, a company director, said he saw two officers put on blue baseball caps marked "police" but that the frightened electrician could not have seen that because he had his back to the officers and was running with his head down.
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Mistakes CAN and DO happen, and the shoot to kill policy proved that. I don't know if everyone they detained or the people in Guantanamo are all guilty, but I wish they'd make it clearer if they are. What happened to evidence?
posted by Acey at 3:03 AM on August 14, 2005