Undercover London police officers faked vital evidence to cover up their fatal role in the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, mistaken for a suicide bomber, a newspaper alleged yesterday.
Special Branch officers from London's Metropolitan Police tried to change a surveillance log detailing the electrician's movements to hide the fact that they had wrongly identified him, the News of the World weekly claimed.
De Menezes, 27, was shot seven times in the head on a London Underground train at Stockwell station in south London.
He was killed on July 22 last year, the day after an alleged attempt to replicate the July 7 attacks by four suspected suicide bombers which killed 52 innocent Underground and bus commuters.
The alleged cover-up meant the blame for the tragedy would have been pinned on senior Met Police commanders or the armed police who fired the bullets -- leaving them open to murder charges, the newspaper said.
The revelations are apparently contained in the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)'s report into the death, which was delivered to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) 10 days ago.
A Special Branch officer mistakenly reported that De Menezes was Hussein Osman, 27, who is facing charges of conspiracy to murder in connection with the July 21 incident.
However, once they realized their fatal error, the log was altered to read that no positive identification had been made.
A government department source told the tabloid: "It says the log was actually tampered with in a major way.
"In particular the words `and' and `not' were inserted about the Osman ID, so it read `and it was not Osman' rather than `it was Osman,'" the source said.
The log was allegedly changed at a debriefing meeting 10 hours after the Brazilian was gunned down.
It had been produced by colleagues of the officers listening to the team's radio messages.
During the debriefing, the officers were allowed to check for errors and amend them -- but crucially, the alterations were not explained and signed as they apparently should have been.
The newspaper quoted the IPCC report as reading: "This looks like an attempt to try and distance Special Branch from the decision [to shoot De Menezes]."
The source said: "It was blatant, it was clumsy ... By doing that forgery they potentially made their colleagues back at the control room at central command at the Yard [police headquarters], and particularly their firearm officer colleagues, liable to be out in the dock for murder."
An IPCC spokesman said the organization "would neither confirm nor deny" anything in the alleged leak.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS