LONDON, 23 August 2005 — Scotland Yard was yesterday challenged by London Underground officials over CCTV footage taken from three cameras trained on the Stockwell tube station platform where the mistaken shooting of 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes by armed anti-terror police took place a day after the failed bombings on July 21.
The police returned the three CCTV tapes saying that they were blank and no good to the investigation. But London Underground officials and transport unions have challenged this claim suggesting that the tapes have either been lost or erased.
A Transport Union official quoted in the Evening Standard newspaper confirmed that “at least three of the four cameras were working. There were no reports of anything wrong with the cameras. Sometimes you may have trouble with one camera, but staff cannot understand how none of the four recorded anything.” A station logbook which records all reports of faulty equipment had no entry regarding the cameras at the time of the shooting on July 22.
The report will further fuel allegations of a cover-up at Scotland Yard over the circumstances leading to the fatal shooting. Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police commissioner, has been warned by the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) that a public inquiry into the shooting “is inevitable.”
The revelations came on the day when two Brazilian government officials, Wagner Goncalves, of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, and Marcio Pereira Pinto Garcia, of the Ministry of Justice, flew in to Heathrow for talks with the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and the Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates over the progress of the investigation and to get “clarification” on a number of matters revealed in the media over the last two weeks.
Maria de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, yesterday called for the police officers who shot her son to be brought to justice. She told the BBC: “They took my son’s life, I am suffering because of them. I want the policeman who did it punished. They ended not only my son’s life but mine as well.”
Mr. de Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder by anti-terror officers from the Metropolitan Police after being mistaken for the 21/7 suicide bomber Osman Hussain, who lived in the same block of flats in Stockwell. He was trailed by a surveillance team from the block of flats to the station, where an armed anti-terror unit joined them. Somewhere along the line communications broke down which led to the shooting tragedy.
Scotland Yard has subsequently been accused of delaying an independent investigation into the killing; of giving out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of the shooting; failing to correct the information; and of a cover-up after leaked information from the IPCC seemed to contradict the earlier Scotland Yard version of events leading up to the shooting.
