De Menezes shooting: UK's top anti-terror officer is singled out

I listened to the news that the police had shot a man at Stockwell tube station on the radio as I drove to collect a friend. When I picked my friend up, I told him what had happened and he said, "Good".

That was the atmosphere in London two weeks after 7-7 and the day after four other men had tried to blow themselves up on the tube. London was on tenterhooks and very angry.

I was suspicious of the news only because the radio kept describing the man who had been shot - we didn't yet know the name Jean Charles de Menezes - as a "suspected suicide bomber".

This description puzzled me. Had the man been carrying a suicide bomb they would not have described him as such. They would have said that a man wearing a suicide belt had been shot before he could detonate it. So for twenty four hours the police continued to talk of the man they had shot as this "suspected suicide bomber". It was only the next day that the police admitted their terrible mistake. This delay in admitting what really happened as been the subject of an enquiry over here.

The enquiry into the matter is at last due to report and is thought to have largely cleared Sir Ian Blair, although Andy Hayman, the overall head of counter terrorism and intelligence, is understood to have been singled out for being deliberately misleading.

The police have been falling over themselves to make clear how unfair they think any criticism levelled at them is:

"This was London in the grips of an attack, two weeks after another terrorist attack had killed 52 people," said one source. "Four men were on the run who could have attacked again, the events of the day were extremely fast moving. There is a sense that the IPCC, having failed to recommend any action against any of the officers involved in the shooting itself needed a scapegoat."

De Menezes, 27, who was making his way to work, was shot seven times in the head by an armed police surveillance team after being mistaken for one of the suspected July 21 suicide bombers. In the hours after the shooting, Scotland Yard maintained that the man targeted was a suspected terrorist, but were forced to concede the following day that an innocent man had been killed.

In tomorrow's report, Mr Hayman is accused of being deliberately misleading over what he revealed on the day of the shooting about the identity of the man the police had killed.

Sir Ian, who said initially the dead man was "directly linked" to anti-terrorist operations, was not told that he was an innocent man until the next day - Saturday July 23.

But, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, sources say there were unconfirmed rumours that the man who had been killed may not have been one of the four suicide bombers being hunted. Mr Hayman is criticised by the IPCC for not passing this on to Mr Blair at a briefing he had with him at 6pm that night.

However, senior sources question how he could have passed on the unsubstantiated rumours at that stage.

I have some sympathy with Hayman if he is being singled out as the only person who should be criticised here. After all, surely Sir Ian asked someone if the man that they had shot was wearing a suicide belt? For the belief that he was wearing one must have been the only justification for the police taking the action that they did.

And yet, for twenty four hours after the incident, we were treated to stories of how the suspect had ran from the police (a lie), and how he had jumped over the ticket barrier (another lie) whilst being pursued by police officers. And yet, in all these reports, the subject of a suicide belt was never raised.

Eventually, the next day, the true story emerged. Jean Charles de Menezes, a totally innocent man, had boarded a tube train - completely unaware that he was being followed by armed officers in plain clothes - and these same officers had pinned him to his seat and fired eleven shots, seven of which entered his head and one which entered his shoulder.

There is much to criticise about the police's behaviour that day, but none of it is limited to anything that Andy Hayman did or didn't do.

Why was a suspected suicide bomber allowed to get on to a bus, when a bus had been blown up a mere two weeks before in London?

Why wasn't the suspect challenged in the streets by armed officers before he could have represented a serious danger to anyone?

The whole bloody operation was a disgrace and picking out Andy Hayman for criticism strikes me as unfair. But this is happening because the enquiry is concentrating on the alleged cover-up rather than on the validity of the operation itself.

Surely we can learn something of how to deal with suicide bombers from the Israelis? You don't allow anyone who you suspect as a suicide bomber to get anywhere near a bus or a train. You challenge them long before that point, in the street, and if you think they are going to detonate themselves and cause any harm to people around them then you take them out.

The de Menezes operation was bungled from start to finish and concentrating on whether the police covered up the fact that they had shot an innocent man rather misses the point. The danger that he represented, regarding his status as a would be suicide bomber, should have been established long before he entered Stockwell tube station.

The fact that it wasn't is what led to this tragedy. The police need to establish a set of guidelines over how suspected suicide bombers should be approached. Following them across London on buses and then shooting them through the head on tube trains surely isn't the best plan we can up with?

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Tags: Jean Charles de Menezes, Sir Ian Blair, Andy Hayman, Stockwell tube station, London bombings, 7-7