Britain:The London police chief who gave the order that led to Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes being shot dead in a London subway train carriage said yesterday that she was told five times that surveillance officers believed the man they were following was a terrorist suspect.
Cdr Cressida Dick told a jury deciding whether "catastrophic errors" by London's Metropolitan Police force amounted to a criminal offence that Mr de Menezes's suspicious behaviour contributed to her decision to order officers to "stop" him. That behaviour included him being nervous and agitated, texting, talking on a mobile phone and getting on and off a bus.
Mr de Menezes was shot dead on July 22nd, 2005, after being mistaken for Hussain Osman, who was suspected of attempting to bomb an underground train the previous day.
Cdr Dick was in command of an operation that day involving surveillance of 21 Scotia Road in south London, believed to be linked to Osman. An armed special branch surveillance team outside the communal block were unable to tell which flat people were emerging from.
Some people left but were not followed, but Mr de Menezes was tailed when he left just after 9.30am. He caught a bus to Brixton subway station, which was closed, then got a bus back to Stockwell subway station.
Cdr Dick said at first he had been both identified and ruled out as being Osman, who was given the codename "Nettletip". She said the confidence of the surveillance team that he was the suspected terrorist had grown by the time he reached Stockwell.
Assisting her in the control room was an officer monitoring what the surveillance teams on the ground were saying: "He was really reasserting to me that the team believed it was Nettletip. I now had three different occasions when the surveillance monitor and one from [the] silver [commander] and again after that; they're certain, that's Nettletip, which made me think they had a firmer identification than at Brixton tube [station]. They really believed it was him."
- (Guardian service)