STRASBOURG: The European Court of Human Rights began hearing a case Wednesday against the British government over the police killing of a Brazilian man mistaken for a suicide bomber soon after the deadly July 2005 bombings.

Nearly a decade after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, his family is still fighting to see someone prosecuted for the 27-year-old’s killing.

The police have maintained they were under extraordinary pressure at the time, with four would-be bombers who had tried to commit mass murder on the run, and that officers who shot de Menezes had feared for their own lives and for those of other passengers on the train.

Queen’s Counsel Clare Montgomery reaffirmed the view that the killing did not amount to murder, while acknowledging serious operational failures.

De Menezes, an electrician, was shot seven times in the head by police officers in a London underground station two weeks after the July 7 attacks in which four suicide bombers killed 52 people.

Police mistook him for failed bomber Hussain Osman, who had attempted to place explosives at another train station the day before the shooting.