Jean Charles Menezes inquest begins, police shooting of innocent man

https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7628021.stm

the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles Menezes began this week,
three years ago police follwed Menezes from his apartment in london suspecting him of being a terrorist and potential suicide bomber.
after Menezes entered the stockwell underground station he was followed and shot by police offices 7 times in the head at close range after entering a train.

it turned out Menezes was innocent, guilty only of living in the same apartment complex as the suspected terrorist.

i'll be very interested in hearing how this turns out,
especially since this is the first time the actual police officers who did the shooting and other people on the train who witnessed it will be testifing in court.

personally i think its terrible that this has taken 3 years, its suffered a number of setbacks and such an actocity shouldn't be allowed drift out of public conciousness without resolution.

what i hope is also addressed is the number of discrepencies that showed up afterwards such as the police claiming that Menedez jumped the turnstyles and ran away form the police when in fact he hadn't.

Don't expect justice to be fair. He was a foreigner and they are the police. They will fudge the outcome and the family will get no satisfaction.

If the police hadn't acted on this (and I am in no way saying they behaved correctly) we would be outraged that a terrorist had gotten away, or worse, had carried out an attack.

They took action against someone they thought was a terrorist. Their actions were extreme, and cost the life of an innocent man, so of course investigations need to be made and actions taken to secure justice for this mans family and to ensure it doesn't happen again.

But if they hadn't taken action and there was a terrorist attack, we would have attacked the police anyway. It seems whatever they do they can't do right for doing wrong.

It will have taken so long because of the sensitive nature of the case. Not only does it involve a foreigner (which really should have no bearing on the case at all!) but the officers involved and put on the stand are highly involved in intelligence and counter-terrorism operations which means that there is a risk with putting them on the stand. Security has to be the tightest and not a hint of who they are (names etc) can escape from this inquest. Not only that but putting this evidence together and setting this up would take a while.

While I can understand why the family want the officers involved to be named and prosecuted, like I said above, that information is pretty sensitive. As Tessybear correctly says, if Mr de Menezes had jumped aboard a train and blown himself up, the police would still have been attacked for it but the officers involved would still not have been named.

The family of Mr de Menezes is extremely biased on this matter. They lost a loved one, but to the officers involved it was one life against many. Mr de Menezes was potentially extremely dangerous, had not answered calls for him to stop but kept going, had come out of the building they'd been watching and had not yet been identified as benign. I would challenge anyone here to try to make the same call. One life against many. Think about it.

i disagree,
i think its a travesty to shoot an unarmed man without even properly identifying him.
saying they had to measure one life against many is misleading because in actuality they didn't know if this was their man, or even if he was in fact a suicide bomber.

a case could be made for that if they knew this man was going to bomb something that day and it was a simple case of mistaken identity.

they followed him and allowed him to get on a bus before he reached the train station, during which time he could of used the bomb.

reports that they called and he didn't stop don't mean much, it was a busy station, the police were also mistaken and said he ran from them, which it later turned out he did not.

at the very least it constitutes gross negligence in my opinion.

shooting a man 7 times in the head without asking him who he is seems bad to me, though i recognise the importance of taking him down quickly had he been a terrorist i think this incident highlights how fear can lead to some very very bad decisions.

Fear can lead to bad decisions. The country was under attack. An unidentified man carrying a rucksack just like the ones used to carry explosives in the other incidents, comes out of a red-flagged building and makes his way onto the Tube, the site of several of the bombings/attempted bombings. When asked to stop, the man continues towards the Tube. You don't know that he has poor English. He attempts to board a train full of civillians. Men, women and children are onboard that train. You still don't know who he is or what he is carrying and he still ignores your calls to stop. Do you let him board the train, knowing that you may be putting innocent lives at risk, or do you do everything in your power to stop him?

We don't know what it was like. We only have hindsight and we don't even have the evidence, we simply have media speculation and reporting and hearsay which should stop from now until this matter is resolved or the media are breaching the human rights of those involved as decided in the case of Starrs v Ruxton in 2000 in Scotland.

7 shots may be excessive force and the officers involved should be reprimanded for that but murder and manslaughter charges are an extreme way of doing so. The end result was tragic but the result of communication failures made in the line of duty and no one person should be punished for that.

i'm not talking about murder charges on specific individuals,
i'm talking about a public admission of fault and negligence.
and also a look into a potential attempt to cover it up.

and if things were that drastic and they felt an attack that imminent then they shouldn't of let him board a bus.

i understand the difficult circumstances, but i don't think that eleviates the wrongdoing, ending someones life on pure speculation.

Except it wasn't pure speculation. There was at least one suspected terroist living at that address and there had been two attacks on that city in that month (1 success, 1 failure). He came out of there with a bulky bag and headed for a known target. Nothing can forgive it but we can at least not condemn it. If he had turned out to be a terrorist and had blown up that train and the public found out that the police had been watching his address the officers involved would have been hung, drawn and quartered and paraded round the streets of London.

These men were doing their jobs. It was a failure to communicate that caused the tragedy as well as the pressure on these officers to keep London from suffering another horror like that on 7/7. It's unfortunate but for these officers it really was one life to save the many. It's sad and I do feel for the family but it's just plain wrong to drag it out this long and scream cover up.

The main trouble with these situations is that even eyewitnesses can give conflicting stories. A bank gets robbed, John says there were 10 men but Mary says there were 5 while Tom says it was 3 and you can trust the media to spin that out of proportion. Until we all sit down and look at the evidence, there will be these rumours flying around but in the meantime follow the rules we get taught in forensics: don't trust the eyewitnesses. Scots law: All facts must be corroborated with science.