The most senior anti-terrorist officer in the UK will be heavily criticized in an official report published today into the events surrounding the killing of an innocent Brazilian man in south London.
While Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police will escape serious censure from the Independent Police Complaints Commission over his role, Andy Hayman, the overall head of counter terrorism and intelligence, is understood to have been singled out for being deliberately misleading.
In the last two weeks the IPCC has withdrawn its criticism of three other officers after being threatened with legal action because it had failed to follow its own guidelines over the way it dealt with them.
The expected findings of Stockwell 2, a two-year IPCC investigation into who in the Metropolitan police knew what and when in the aftermath of the shooting have caused disquiet at Scotland Yard.
The force has always maintained that anti-terrorist officers were faced with unprecedented challenges on July 22, 2005, as they searched for at least four suicide bombers who had attempted to blow themselves up on tube trains and a bus on the London transport system the day before.
There has also been private criticism of the way the IPCC has conducted its first high-profile investigation since the watchdog body was reformed and made independent of the police.
"This was London in the grips of an attack, two weeks after another terrorist attack had killed 52 people," one source said. "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 he was innocent.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not