A shrine at Stockwell Station for Jean Charles de Menezes (Pic: Wikimedia Commons / Caroline Ford)
On 22 July 2005, police killed 27 year old Jean Charles De Menezes as he boarded the underground to go to work.
Cops got on the train and shot him seven times in the head and neck in front of other commuters.
Eyewitness Rachel Wilson, who was sitting opposite Jean Charles, said she thought the officers were lads “messing around”. She added, “Only when I saw blood, I realised it was not the case. Then I thought they were terrorists.”
The killing was four years into the United States-led “War on Terror” and two weeks after the 7/7 bombings in London. There was an atmosphere of distrust as police searched for the potential terror suspects.
The government announced just a week before the killing that “armed police officers could be given more aggressive shoot to kill orders, telling them to fire at the heads of suicide bombers”. There was no public scrutiny of this decision.
Asad Rehman from the Justice 4 Jean campaign told Socialist Worker, “The killing had come in a much broader context of the wars in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.
“There was a general rise in Islamophobia and the language that human rights should not be an obstruction.”
Surveillance officers had waited outside Jean Charles’s flat in Tulse Hill, south London. They followed him as he took two buses and got on the tube at Stockwell station.
Police realised almost immediately after they shot him that the Brazilian electrician was not the person they had meant to follow, a suspect in a failed suicide bombing the day before.
But Metropolitan police chief Ian Blair continued to claim for the next 24 hours that he had been involved in a terror plot.
Asad explained, “Ian Blair took to the airwaves to say this was one of the failed bombers and it was for the safety of the people of London.”
They spread rumours that he had run down the escalators and was wearing a bulky jacket that aroused suspicion he was carrying a bomb.
None of it was true.
The Metropolitan police tried to dismiss the killing as an accident and then obstructed the family’s fight for justice by spying on them.
Asad said, “Rather than being supported by the police, the family were being treated like suspects.”
Family members, “faced the might of the establishment, the Metropolitan police and the
government. The state wouldn’t allow their policy of the ‘War on Terror’ to be tarnished. They saw it as collateral damage.”
The police force was found guilty of putting the public at risk for the way it carried out its operation.
But none of the individual officers were tried for the killing itself.
In 2008, then director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer said there was not enough evidence to prosecute.
There was an inquest but the coroner instructed the jury not to return a verdict of unlawful
killing. Asad said, “We believe a jury would have returned that verdict. The family wanted to let a jury decide.
“It is testament to the determination and courage of the family that they kept campaigning. They wanted their day in court.”
Far from being punished for their role, top cops were rewarded. Dick became head of the Metropolitan police. Ian Blair was sent to the House of Lords. He died earlier this month.
As Asad argued, the state continues to use the threat of “terrorism” to push for more authoritarian measures against people opposing genocide in Palestine.
It doesn’t make any of us safer. “If the state can kill with impunity that threatens all of us. The campaign shone a light on how our right to security was being threatened by the government and the Met police.”
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