Intelligence behind raid was wrong, officials say
I said yesterday that I thought it was time they admitted an error.
Of course they haven't done so, but in police-speak they've done the nearest thing. Police are now saying that they had "no choice" other than to investigate the claims they had received regarding a house in Forest Gate in London's East End.
"No choice" is also police-speak for "blame someone else". It amounts to a tacit admission that the two arrested men, one of whom has been shot, are innocent. Although both men remain in police custody, and the police say they may remain there until the end of the week, the admission means it is likely they will be eventually released.
One official, with knowledge why police acted and what had been found from days of searching, said the intelligence had been acted on correctly, but added last night: "There is no viable device at that house. There is no device being constructed, or chemicals. There does not appear to be anything there or anywhere else."The police have said they intend to continue searching the house until the end of the week.
As lawyers for the two arrested men continued to protest their innocence, it emerged that the man who had passed the specific information that led to the raid in which a man was shot last Friday was a police informant who had been providing intelligence about the activities of alleged Islamist militants for several weeks.
It is understood that attempts to corroborate the information were not made because of the perceived need to act quickly. "If there was an immediate risk to public safety, there would not have been time to bug the house," an intelligence source said. A counter-terrorism official said: "If the intelligence was right there was a serious risk to the public. We did not know if it was right or not until we went in." Another official added: "Intelligence is patchy. Even if it suggests a 5% likelihood of something nasty, we can't take that risk".
But what remains puzzling is the reliance on a single apparently uncorroborated source for information that prompted a high-profile mass raid which, even without the shooting of one of the men, would have provoked a strong reaction.
Andy Hayman, the Met's assistant commissioner specialist operations, refused to apologise for the raid yesterday while admitting that so far officers had not found the specific item they were looking for - thought to be a chemical device - in the terraced house in Forest Gate which was the subject of a pre-dawn raid involving more than 250 officers, including armed teams and government scientists.
He refused to end the confusion about the raid or clarify how a 23-year-old man was shot during the operation. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is likely to take months to produce a report on the shooting.
It's a three bedroom semi in the East End, it's not Buckingham Palace. The chances are they have covered every inch of the place several times by now.
It's beginning to look like it's time to say sorry, pay the shot man some compensation, and move on.
The longer they drag this on, the more it looks like they are simply unwilling to admit to an error.
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