LONDON, 24 August 2005 — The police marksmen who mistakenly shot dead 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes on a train at Stockwell tube station on July 22, a day after the failed 21/7 London suicide bombings, face criminal charges if the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) make recommendations that criminal proceedings should be initiated.
This was confirmed yesterday at the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes at the Inner South District Coroner’s Court in Southwark in south London.
Richard Latham, representing the IPCC told the coroner John Sampson that criminal charges are being considered. “In due course there may, I emphasize the word may, be recommendations that criminal proceedings should be initiated,” he said.
Senior IPCC investigator John Cummins told the inquest hearing that the investigation still needs “considerable amount” of fresh work done and that it should be completed within four months, most likely in December.
Latham added that “there is an intention to report before Christmas. No one would expect an investigation like this to be hurried. It must be wide-ranging and conducted with very considerable care.”
On Monday, Maria de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, 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.”
However, in London the family’s solicitor Harriet Wistrith stressed that she wants the IPCC to forge ahead with the investigation “so that the family gets some justice here. We really don’t want there to be any chance that those responsible aren’t accountable. There has been a whole lot of misinformation that has been cricualting for quite some time.”
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 they were joined by an armed anti-terror unit. Somewhere along the line communications broke down which led to the shooting tragedy.
Scotland Yard has been accused of delaying an investigation into the killing; of giving misleading information in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and of a cover-up after information from the IPCC contradicted their earlier version of events leading up to the shooting.
However, yesterday two Brazilian government officials, Wagner Goncalves, of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, and Marcio Pereira Pinto Garcia, of the Ministry of Justice, and the Brazilian ambassador to London at a press conference, said that they did not believe that there was a police cover-up of the events leading to the shooting.
