Sir Ian Blair and the London shoot-to-kill fandango
scotsman: The undoing of PC Blair
.."All talk of the commissioner folding over and falling on his sword is rather preposterous," one government source insisted last night of a man who originally described his force's response to the terror alert as "close to genius". But, confronted with the acute political embarrassment that his management of the terror crisis has provoked, the source added: "You can take it for granted that no one in the Cabinet is happy about this fandango."
..For the de Menezes family, the official refusal to clarify the circumstances surrounding Jean Charles's death is a key failure for which Sir Ian must answer. "For three weeks we have had to listen to lie after lie about Jean and how he was killed," Pereira said. "The police knew Jean was innocent. Yet they let my family suffer. They let us suffer. Ian Blair let us suffer."
Hours after the killing, Sir Ian claimed de Menezes, to the best of his knowledge, "was challenged and refused to obey police instructions". Police were aware that he had not been wearing a heavy coat, that he did not jump over the barriers - in fact, he picked up a free newspaper and passed through the ticket barrier normally - and that he was shot in the head after being restrained by a surveillance officer.
Sir Ian's own account of how he learned the truth, appearing in a newspaper interview today, offer an unnerving picture of chaos and a lack of communication between senior officers and their men and women on the ground. Admitting that he did not know his officers had killed an innocent man until 24 hours after the fatal shots were fired, the most experienced policeman in the country said: "Somebody came in at 10.30 [Saturday morning] and said the equivalent of 'Houston we have a problem'.
"He didn't use those words but he said, 'We have some difficulty here, there is a lack of connection'. I thought, 'That's dreadful, what are we going to do about that ?'."
Although he uses the interview to dismiss allegations of a cover-up, Sir Ian fails to explain why, once the force was in possession of the full, awful truth, it failed to correct the misleading accounts in circulation.
Even after it was admitted that his officers had killed the wrong man, Sir Ian continued to give misleading details. When pressed on standard procedure for handling suicide bombers who were trying to surrender, he said: "We will try and get them under control and that was what this man was being asked to do."
Subsequent revelations have now confirmed that the police themselves were retailing the inaccurate account of de Menezes' final seconds. The Brazilian's post-mortem report, dated five days after his death, recorded the information that he did vault the ticket barrier and fled on to the train - information that experts maintain could only have been provided by the police.
The revelation that Sir Ian later attempted to delay the official inquiry, in order to maintain the primacy of the anti-terror campaign, only reinforced suspicions that he had something to hide. Read more
.."All talk of the commissioner folding over and falling on his sword is rather preposterous," one government source insisted last night of a man who originally described his force's response to the terror alert as "close to genius". But, confronted with the acute political embarrassment that his management of the terror crisis has provoked, the source added: "You can take it for granted that no one in the Cabinet is happy about this fandango."
..For the de Menezes family, the official refusal to clarify the circumstances surrounding Jean Charles's death is a key failure for which Sir Ian must answer. "For three weeks we have had to listen to lie after lie about Jean and how he was killed," Pereira said. "The police knew Jean was innocent. Yet they let my family suffer. They let us suffer. Ian Blair let us suffer."
Hours after the killing, Sir Ian claimed de Menezes, to the best of his knowledge, "was challenged and refused to obey police instructions". Police were aware that he had not been wearing a heavy coat, that he did not jump over the barriers - in fact, he picked up a free newspaper and passed through the ticket barrier normally - and that he was shot in the head after being restrained by a surveillance officer.
Sir Ian's own account of how he learned the truth, appearing in a newspaper interview today, offer an unnerving picture of chaos and a lack of communication between senior officers and their men and women on the ground. Admitting that he did not know his officers had killed an innocent man until 24 hours after the fatal shots were fired, the most experienced policeman in the country said: "Somebody came in at 10.30 [Saturday morning] and said the equivalent of 'Houston we have a problem'.
"He didn't use those words but he said, 'We have some difficulty here, there is a lack of connection'. I thought, 'That's dreadful, what are we going to do about that ?'."
Although he uses the interview to dismiss allegations of a cover-up, Sir Ian fails to explain why, once the force was in possession of the full, awful truth, it failed to correct the misleading accounts in circulation.
Even after it was admitted that his officers had killed the wrong man, Sir Ian continued to give misleading details. When pressed on standard procedure for handling suicide bombers who were trying to surrender, he said: "We will try and get them under control and that was what this man was being asked to do."
Subsequent revelations have now confirmed that the police themselves were retailing the inaccurate account of de Menezes' final seconds. The Brazilian's post-mortem report, dated five days after his death, recorded the information that he did vault the ticket barrier and fled on to the train - information that experts maintain could only have been provided by the police.
The revelation that Sir Ian later attempted to delay the official inquiry, in order to maintain the primacy of the anti-terror campaign, only reinforced suspicions that he had something to hide. Read more
posted by exoplanet at 2:44 PM
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