London police make minor changes to shoot-to-kill policy <<We are going to the head of Tony Blair. Watch!>>
Police on Saturday also denied a newspaper report that they had offered US$1 million in compensation to Menezes’ family.
“We will not be bought off. We will not be silenced,” the man’s parents, Matozinho and Maria de Menezes, said, according to the newspaper
(AP)
20 August 2005
LONDON - London’s Metropolitan Police said on Saturday that it has reviewed the use of deadly force against suspected terrorists following the killing of an innocent man, but has made only minor changes.
“There has been a review. The police have reviewed the strategy and we have made one or two small changes, but the operation remains essentially the same,” said a police spokeswoman.
She declined to discuss details of the changes in Operation Kratos, the force’s name for what British media call a “shoot to kill” policy.
The review comes after the July 22 killing of a Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, who was wrongly suspected of being a suicide terrorist.
Police on Saturday also denied a newspaper report that they had offered US$1 million in compensation to Menezes’ family.
“The only discussions we have had so far with the family of Jean Charles de Menezes have been about initial expenses and we strongly refute any suggestion that a figure anywhere in the region of one million dollars has been offered as compensation,” the force said in a statement.
A report in Saturday’s editions of The Daily Mail said a senior officer had made an initial offer of compensation during a visit to Brazil two weeks ago.
“We will not be bought off. We will not be silenced,” the man’s parents, Matozinho and Maria de Menezes, said, according to the newspaper.
On Friday, a cousin of the slain man called for the resignation of Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the London force.
“They have killed Jean and then told lies,” Alessandro Pereira said, shedding tears at a nationally televised news conference in London.
“For the sake of my family, for the sake of the people of London, in Jean’s name I say that those responsible should resign. Ian Blair should resign,” Pereira said.
Blair, who apologized for the mistaken killing, has denied there was any police cover-up or attempt to block the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s investigation now under way.
Blair said he had not resisted the investigation, but only sought advice from the Home Office on how secret intelligence would be dealt with, given that the police complaints commission had a duty to disclose all its findings to the victim’s family.
“What I actually said was we have a unique situation here. At that stage I, and my officers, thought the dead man was a suicide bomber,” Blair said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
“We are in the middle of the biggest counterterrorism operation, is it wise to bring another set of investigators into the middle of that?”
Blair told the BBC that police took responsibility for Menezes’ death, but he said while it was tragic it was just one death out of 57 - including the four suicide bombers.
“The context here is the largest criminal inquiry in English history with 52 innocent victims dead. ... We can’t let that one tragic death outweigh all others,” he said.
Recently leaked documents from the official complaints commission investigation into Menezes’ killing appear to contradict original statements by police that the Brazilian had been behaving suspiciously.
On July 22, Blair told journalists that Menezes had failed to obey the instructions from the surveillance police who were following him as a suspected suicide bomber. In the heightened state of anxiety after the earlier terrorist attacks, witnesses reported that Menezes was wearing a heavy padded coat and jumped over ticket barriers at Stockwell subway station before bolting toward a train.
The Metropolitan Police never contradicted those claims.
However, the documents leaked to ITV News suggest that Menezes, an electrician, walked casually into the subway station and was wearing a light denim jacket.
Brazil’s government said it was “outraged” by the reports about Menezes’ killing, and said it would send two officials to Britain to meet with police and the commission investigating the killing. |
