Britain Says Man Killed by Police Had No Tie to Bombings

July 24, 2005

By ALAN COWELL and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

LONDON, July 23 - Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers gunned down at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here.
The man was identified by police as Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, described by officers as an electrician on his way to work. "He was not connected to incidents in central London on 21st July, 2005, in which four explosive devices were partly detonated," a police statement said.
At the same time, the police said they had found a link between four attackers on July 7 and the men who tried to carry out carbon copy attacks July 21. The July 7 attacks killed the bombers and 52 others.
A flier in a backpack found with undetonated explosives on a London bus was for a whitewater rafting center at Bala, North Wales, where two of the July 7 bombers had been photographed just weeks before the attack, a police official said.
The police also said late Saturday that after the failed attacks on July 21, they found a mysterious package - possibly a fifth explosive device - in Little Wormwood Scrubs, northwest of London.
The explosive was "almost exactly the same" as ones in the failed attacks on that day, a police official said.
Of the fast-unfolding developments, the most overwhelming for many Londoners, was the police admission that an apparently innocent man had been gunned down in full public view - a killing that left the city even more rattled after a wave of attacks, alarms, scares and shootings that, in a brief three weeks has propelled London from the euphoria of the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park to a sense of embattled siege.
"For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets," a police statement said, noting that the police had started a formal inquiry.
The admission by the police that it had killed a man not involved in the investigation revived and fueled an already tense debate over the arming of British police officers. It also came after a series of police misstatements since July 7 when the first bombers struck. (Related Article)
The shooting shocked many of the country's 1.6 million Muslims, already alarmed by a publicly acknowledged shoot-to-kill policy directed against suspected suicide bombers. And it has dealt a major setback to the police inquiry into suspected terrorist cells in London.
"This really is an appalling set of circumstances," said John O'Connor, a former police commander. "The consequences are quite horrible." Azzam Tamimi, head of the Muslim Association of Britain, said: "This is very frightening. People will be afraid to walk the streets, or go on the tube, or carry anything in their hands."
A cousin of the dead man, interviewed on Brazil's leading television network, identified him as Jo?o Alves Menezes and said he was an electrician who had been working in England for more than three years. The cousin, Alex Pereira Alves, identified Mr. Menezes' body in London, the network said.
Mr. Menezes was from the interior state of Minas Gerais, home of the bulk of migrants from Brazil to the United States and Europe and had been in Britain legally, Mr. Alves said. He would have been on his way to work that morning, he said, and had no reason to flee the police.
"How could they have done such a thing as to kill him from behind?" Mr. Alves told the Globo Television Network. "How could they have confused and killed a light-skinned person who had no resemblance at all to an Asian?"
Another cousin, Aleide Menezes, said in an interview with Brazil's national radio network that Mr. Menezes understood English well and would have understood the officer's instructions. Other relatives, in television and newspaper interviews, said the family was Roman Catholic and that Mr. Menezes had nothing to do with Islam.
In an official statement issued late Saturday, the Brazilian government said it was "shocked and perplexed" by the killing and was waiting for an explanation.
The shooting occurred the day after the copycat attackers tried to bomb three other subway trains and a bus, but their bombs failed to explode. Plainclothes police officers staking out an apartment followed a man who emerged from it, then chased him into the Stockwell subway station and onto a train. The man tripped, and one of the officers in pursuit fired five rounds.
After the shooting, Sir Ian Blair, the police commissioner, said the man was "directly linked to the ongoing and expanding antiterrorist operation," and the police issued images from closed-circuit cameras of four suspects in the failed attacks. They said the man they shot may not have been one of the four, but he was still being sought in their inquiry.
A Friday statement said that the man's "clothing and his behavior at the station added to their suspicions," apparently referring to reports that the man was wearing a bulky jacket on a summer day.
Through most of Saturday, the police refused to give any further details. Then, in the late afternoon, Scotland Yard issued its statement admitting the "mistake." So far in the investigation, the police have detained two suspects. It was not clear whether those men were among the four caught on security cameras.
In the latest alarm on Saturday, police cordoned off an area in north-west London, and Peter Clarke, head of London's Anti-Terrorist police, said that a package that was discovered appeared "to have been left in the bushes, rather than hidden."
"Naturally this is a matter of concern," he added.
The link between the two bombing teams, at the white water rafting center in north Wales, is the latest in a series of connections made by detectives since Thursday. They have found that the bombs for both teams were made of the same homemade material, were roughly the same size and were carried in similar backpacks, officials said.
Asked if Prime Minister Tony Blair would address the killing of Mr. Menezes, a spokeswoman said Mr. Blair was "kept updated on all developments, but this is a matter for the Metropolitan Police. We have nothing to add." But with the nation jittery after the attacks and the shooting, Mr. Blair was expected to confront political passions likely to be inflamed by what his critics are depicting as excesses of a war on terrorism that have eroded freedoms.
"This policy is another overreaction of the government and police," said Ajmal Masroor, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Britain.
Both the government and the police have sought the support of British Muslims to assist in the inquiry.
"This will turn people against the police, and this is not good," said Mr. Tamimi, of the Muslim Association. "We want that people stay beside the police. We need to convince the people to cooperate."
Civil rights groups also seemed likely to demand new curbs on the police at precisely the moment officers have been given much freer hand to pursue the investigation.
"No one should rush to judgment in any case of this kind, especially at a time of heightened tension," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, a civil and human rights group. She acknowledged, however, that officers faced "knife-edged, split-second decisions often made in times of great danger."
In a country used to unarmed police officers, the shooting seemed to be a stark turning point - one that seemed even more portentous after the police admission on Saturday.
The killing revived a never-resolved debate among the public and the police over the arming of officers. In one recent case, officers faced trial after shooting a man carrying a wooden table leg in the mistaken belief that he was armed.
Some police officers authorized to carry weapons now say they prefer not to because of the risk of prosecution if they make mistakes.
Normally British police officers are under orders to give ample warming and, if they have no choice but to open fire, to aim to wound. However, according to London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, that has given way to a shoot-to-kill policy in some circumstances.
"If you are dealing with someone who might be a suicide bomber, if they remain conscious they could trigger plastic explosives or whatever device is on them. And therefore overwhelmingly in these circumstances it is going to be a shoot-to-kill policy," he said after the shooting Friday, but before the acknowledgment by the police that the dead man was not part of the inquiry.
Police guidelines for dealing with suspected suicide bombers recommend shooting at the head rather than the body in case the suspect is carrying explosives.
Except in Northern Ireland, at airports and nuclear facilities, British police officers are not routinely armed. A small percentage of officers - roughly 7 percent in London - have weapons training, which is also required for the use of Taser stun guns, available to nearly all police forces. As routine weapons, officers carry batons and tear-gas-like spray. Of more than 30,000 officers in London, around 2,000 are authorized to carry weapons, a Scotland Yard spokesman said, speaking anonymously under police rules.
Even before Saturday's police statement, Britons had been bracing to see how their vaunted sense of fair play and civil rights survives the onslaught by attackers and the measures to combat it.
"Many civil liberties will have to be infringed to impose the requirement on all communities, including Britain's Muslims, to destroy the terrorists before they destroy us," the author Tom Bower wrote in The Daily Mail on Saturday.
The country's Muslim minority has expressed vulnerability to a backlash since it was announced that the July 7 bombers were all Muslims, three of them British-born descendants of Pakistani immigrants in the northern city of Leeds. Groups linked to Al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for both sets of attacks.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission said it feared that "innocent people may lose their lives due to the new shoot-to-kill policy of the Metropolitan Police."
The rash of attacks, incidents, alarms and arrests has rocked a city that, even during the days of I.R.A. attacks, was used to being warned in advance about bombings. Indeed, after several years of an I.R.A. truce in mainland Britain, the howl of police sirens, the popping of gunfire and the thud of explosives has ended a mood of complacency underpinned by Britain's relative prosperity.
Now, after the bombings on July 7, the attempts on July 21, and the shooting incident, the city seems far less sure of itself.
"The realization that the events of July 7 were not an isolated conspiracy has changed the way that we travel on the city's public transport system, probably forever," Damian Whitworth wrote in The Times of London, recounting how "suspicion, fear and panic spread like a virus" through the subways.
The Independent said, "There seems to be a state of denial about the pervasive sense of fear that exists in London at the moment."
At the same time, British authorities are facing unusually frank criticism from officials and leaders of some Muslim states.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador, said in a radio interview on Friday that it was a "true criticism" to say Britain had offered sanctuary too easily. "Allowing them to go on using the hospitality and the generosity of the British people to emanate from here such calls for killing and such I think is wrong."
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan also noted that some Islamic groups banned in Pakistan "operate with impunity" in Britain.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Stephen Grey, Souad Mekhennet and H?l?ne Fouquet in London, William K. Rashbaum in New York and Larry Rohter in Rio de Janeiro.