Brazilian electrician mistaken for a terrorist suspect was killed by London police because of fundamental failures in planning a surveillance operation.
In a rare case against the London police, prosecutors say that de Menezes was shot seven times
LONDON:A Brazilian electrician mistaken for a terrorist suspect was killed by London police because of fundamental failures in planning a surveillance operation, a prosecutor said on Monday as the police was put on trial for its conduct.
“Shocking and catastrophic’’ blunders by London’s police force led to the killing of an innocent Brazilian man, shot dead on a train by officers who had mistaken him for a suicide bomber, a court heard.
Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was gunned down as he boarded an underground train in London on July 22, 2005, by officers who had wrongly identified him as one of four men who tried to attack the London transport system the day before.
The botched suicide bombings, just two weeks after four young British Islamists killed themselves and 52 people on three underground trains and a bus in the capital’s worst peacetime attack, had sparked a frantic manhunt by British police.
“The disaster was not the result of a fast-moving operation going suddenly and unpredictably awry,’’ said prosecutor Clare Montgomery, describing the shooting as a “shocking and catastrophic error’’.
‘’It was the result of fundamental failures to carry out a planned operation in a safe and reasonable way.’’ Mongomery said the police had put the public at risk by allowing a man suspected of trying to bomb the capital’s transport system the day before to get on buses and into an underground station.
The rare corporate case against London’s Metropolitan Police Service was brought after prosecutors decided last year there was insufficient evidence to charge individual officers involved in the operation, to the fury of de Menezes’s family.
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