Jean Charles de Menezes
New drama depicting wild police killing and cover up is a must watch
An innocent man walks calmly onto the London Underground at Stockwell station after picking up a copy of the Metro paper and swiping his wallet at the ticket barriers.
Seconds later he is shot in the head seven times at point blank range by police.
Once you’ve seen this scene of 22 July, 2005 – depicted by the new drama series ‘Suspect’ – it’s impossible to get it out of your mind.
Wikipedia
I thought I knew a bit about the killing twenty years ago of the Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes. I remember it vividly, having seen, live, the respected Sky News channel report: ‘SUICIDE BOMBER SHOT ON TUBE’ (and been suspicious about it – and similar headlines in the newspapers – at the time). We were told de Menezes had jumped the tube barriers and was wearing a ‘bulky’ coat: all lies. (I then covered the story for the Independent here and here, and expressed opinions on it in an article for the New Statesman that has bizarrely been taken offline but was briefly picked up by the Guardian here.)
But the purpose of this post is to encourage you to find a way of watching the Disney Plus (and I think Apple TV) drama, as I did this weekend. As another viewer, the conservative commentator Peter Hitchens writes this morning:
When police killed the wholly innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, I defended them. I thought that, if they had genuinely feared he was a terrorist armed with a bomb, they were justified in what they did. I now greatly regret that.
The young man’s cruel death is unbearable. I also find it hard to believe I was so totally fooled, with all that rubbish about how he had leaped over the ticket barrier, when he hadn’t.
The painful, icy new TV series, Suspect, in which the de Menezes case is dramatised, makes it clear that the police bungled almost every aspect of the event. They had no idea who they were following and had persuaded themselves he was someone he could not have been.
Despite their grandiose uniforms and fancy titles, senior officers did not act responsibly. Why should they? No system exists to hold them to account.
The Met commissioner at the time, Sir Ian Blair (now in the house of ‘Lords’), is rightly cast as the villain of the piece, alongside Cressida Dick, who ran the Stockwell operation and was then promoted to Met chief herself. De Menezes was killed because he lived in the same block of flats as a suspected terrorist, and the police, through their incompetence, mistook him for someone who looked nothing like him shortly after the ‘7/7’ terror attacks.
What the drama left me thinking most, was that the officers, who themselves did sail over the ticket barriers, roaring like a pack of wolves, were up for a kill.
But the other thing, once again, is the total lack of police accountability, as Hitchens now notes. No officer was ever held accountable, much like the many black deaths (a separate issue) in police custody.
How do we move forward from here? The role of the Independent Police Complaints Commission [IPCC] is confusing. A brave secretary there, leaked images which showed the truth about de Menezes, and was arrested for it. The IPPC comes across as merely an extension of the police itself. Has that always been the case? Has it got worse?
I have no idea, and am not a crime expert. But I am left reeling from a well researched and haunting drama that you should see if and when you can.