The Observer | Focus | Death in Stockwell: the unanswered questions

Death in Stockwell: the unanswered questions

He wasn't wearing a heavy jacket. He used his card to get into the station. He didn't vault the barrier. And now police say there are no CCTV pictures to reveal the truth. So why did plainclothes officers shoot young Jean Charles de Menezes seven times in the head, thinking he posed a terror threat? Special report by Tony Thompson, and Tom Phillips in Brazil.

Tony Thompson and Tom Phillips in Brazil
Sunday August 14, 2005
The Observer

When armed police surrounded the home of Muktar Said-Ibrahim in London's north Kensington earlier this month and ordered him outside, the 27-year-old had only one question: 'How do I know you're not going to shoot me like that guy at Stockwell tube station?' As a suspect in the failed bombings of 21 July, he was perhaps right to be nervous.

A week earlier a Brazilian electrician called Jean Charles de Menezes had been shot and killed by armed police less than 24 hours after the attempted bomb attacks. Everyone was nervous. What would the police do next?

Now an Observer investigation has raised fresh questions about the death of de Menezes, whose killing is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The Observer has discovered that a key element of the investigation will be scrutiny of a delay in calling an armed team to arrest de Menezes, which meant he had already entered the station by the time the officers arrived.

That delay was crucial. If the police thought de Menezes was dangerous - perhaps a bomber - the fact that he was already in the station would have heightened tension and increased the chances of something going wrong.

Evidence of this hold-up should have been provided by CCTV footage from dozens of cameras covering the Stockwell ticket hall, escalators, platforms and train carriages.

However, police now say most of the cameras were not working. Yet pictures are available of a bombing suspect leaving another station nearby, and after the 7 July attacks tube boses could have been expected to make extra efforts to see that all their cameras were in action.

The questions are mounting. Initial claims that de Menezes was targeted because he was wearing a bulky coat, refused to stop when challenged and then vaulted the ticket barriers have all turned out to be false. He was wearing a denim jacket, used a standard Oyster electronic card to get into the station and simply walked towards the platform unchallenged.

It has also been suggested that officers did not identify themselves properly before shooting de Menezes seven times in the head.

In the absence of CCTV footage the inquiry will have to rely on the testimony of eyewitnesses, though many of those who claim to have seen the incident have provided contradictory accounts of what happened.

The inquiry comes as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, announced an expansion of his firearms unit to cope with the new terrorist threat.

Despite the death of de Menezes and the charging of two firearms officers with murder in connection with the case of Harry Stanley, shot dead when officers believed the table leg he was carrying was a shotgun, Blair believes there will be no shortage of volunteers for firearms duty, insisting the officers feel 'very well supported' by the force.

He insists the shoot-to-kill policy is the 'least worst' way of tackling suicide bombers and refuses to rule out other innocent people being shot in similar circumstances. 'I am not certain the tactic we have is the right tactic, but it is the best we have found so far.'

Known to his friends as Jem, Jean Charles was one of two children of Maria and Matozinho de Menezes, a farming couple in Gonzaga, a village 800 kilometres (nearly 500 miles) north-east of Sao Paulo.

His parents live in a tiny two-bedroom bungalow at the end of a dirt road. Most people living in the area eke out a living from mining or agriculture. As a child, de Menezes wanted to be a cattle rancher but became fascinated with electronics and left the farm at 14 to study and live with his uncle in São Paulo.

'My son was such an intelligent boy, ever since he was born,' says Jean's mother 'Dona' Maria Otoni de Menezes, sobbing. 'He battled, he worked hard. All he wanted to do was work, to support his family. We are a poor family. We hardly have anything. As he grew up he used to say: "Don't worry, mum. I'm going to help you. Have faith in God".'

Dona Maria remembers Jean the trabalhador [worker]. The only complaint he ever had, said Dona Maria, was about money. 'He earned a pittance. Jean used to say the only way to earn more was to go overseas.'

Gonzaga is at the centre of a mostly illegal migration boom from Latin America's largest country to the United States and Europe. The young de Menezes planned to follow the example of his cousin, Reuben, who lives in a new three-bedroom house, paid for with the money he earned as a landscape gardener in Massachusetts for five years. He arrived in the US on a tourism visa and stayed until the immigration authorities eventually caught and deported him.

Jean de Menezes too wanted to go to the US but was unable to get permission. Instead he flew to London in 2002 as a tourist and then obtained a student visa to remain until June 2003.

Living with his cousins, Vivien and Patricia, in a red-brick block of flats in Tulse Hill, south London, Jean took a four-month course in English in nearby Norbury, achieving near-fluency. He soon found work as an electrician and as a kitchen porter. He regularly sent money to his parents and phoned them three times a week.

He spent what little spare time he had either with his cousins, his girlfriend Andrina or at the Guanabara, a Brazilian club in Holborn.

'I remember he phoned me once [from London] and he sounded so happy,' says Dona Maria. '"Mum I'm working honestly," he said. "Everything that I buy I pay for."' His father, Matozinho, nods in agreement. 'He said England was a beleza [beauty].'

When de Menezes returned to Gonzaga last summer he told friends and family that he planned to stay in London for a further three years so that he could earn enough money to fulfil his dream of buying a cattle ranch. After that he would return to Brazil permanently.

Back in London his student visa expired. He had no intention yet of returning to Brazil, where the average salary of £50 per month would prevent him achieving his dream of owning a ranch. Instead, he did what many illegal immigrants do and turned to the black market.

'It's like knowing who to go to in order to buy drugs or pirate DVDs,' says Dani, a Brazilian student living in north London. 'It is a very close community and everyone knows the people to go to if you need help with your visa.' De Menezes did what he needed to: he 'shaded' the rules.

For de Menezes life in London was for the most part uneventful. He had been stopped by a police a few times as part of routine stop and search inquiries, once having his bag examined by officers outside Brixton tube station.

On each occasion the police had asked him to stop and he did so. However, on each occasion the officers concerned were in full uniform.

Two weeks before he was killed, de Menezes had been attacked by a gang of white youths, seemingly at random. According to friends this experience left him shaken and nervous.

Like all Londoners, Jean was also affected by the bomb blasts. While the capital bounced back relatively quickly after the first attack, the second wave - despite failing to produce any casualties - generated a higher level of fear. Jean told friends he was so worried about using the tube he was considering buying a motorbike to get around the capital.

The day after the attempted bombings on 21 July, tensions in London were particularly high. Police had rapidly issued CCTV footage of four suspects and made public appeals for information about them.

Hundreds of hours of CCTV were made available and sifted through in record time in order to release images to the public. CCTV footage had also proved crucial in identifying the suspects in the 7 July attacks. The Observer can reveal that police even found footage from train carriages showing the bombers at the moment of detonation.

After 21 July officers also examined information found within the unexploded device recovered from the top deck of the No 26 bus in Hackney. The Observer understands that, although information within the bag pointed to an address in Tulse Hill, it was not clear whether it had been placed there as a red herring or whether it was the address of one of the bombers.

The address was the same block of nine flats, spread over three stories, where de Menezes lived with his cousins. By that same evening, the block was under close surveillance by a specialist, unarmed police team.

Wary of the experience of officers in Madrid who, having tracked down bombers to an apartment block, burst in just as the terrorists blew themselves up, killing one policeman in the process, detectives began a race against time to obtain information about the layout of the block in an attempt to ascertain exactly where the bombers were likely to be. They then began drawing up a plan to assault the block.

At around 10am that Friday morning, officers watching the address saw a man, de Menezes, emerge from the communal entrance. He had received a phone call earlier asking him to fix a fire alarm at a property in Kilburn, north London. But the police thought they might, just, have someone important in their sights.

De Menezes was followed for five minutes as he walked to a bus stop, He then boarded a No 2 bus, along with several plainclothes officers who, again, were unarmed. The officers hoped de Menezes might lead them to some of the men pictured on the CCTV stills.

At some point de Menezes phoned a colleague saying he would be arriving late because tube services were disrupted as a result of the previous day's incidents. It is not clear whether members of the surveillance team heard this conversation. De Menezes was on the bus for a further 15 minutes until he reached Stockwell station.

The surveillance team were under strict instructions not to allow de Menezes to board a train and a rapid decision was made to arrest him using armed officers, a procedure known as a 'hard stop'. But because the officers in the surveillance team had no weapons, they had to change places with officers from SO19, the Metropolitan Police firearms unit.

By the time the armed officers arrived, De Menezes was already inside, using his Oyster card to enter the station and casually walking down the escalator towards the platform.

The number of armed officers in the Metropolitan Police had been increased last January in response to a potential terrorist threat as part of a revaluation of resources following 11 September. At the same time a number of officers were given specific training on how to deal with suicide bombers. The training was based on the experience of police and military units in countries such as Israel and Sri Lanka where similar attacks are common.

By studying footage of attacks and even interviewing failed bombers, senior Met officers drew up a list of 'precursor signals' that generally occur shortly before detonation of a device. Most have not been made public but include the potential bomber looking 'detached' from his or her surroundings and becoming introspective.

In such situations new guidance suggested the officers shoot the suspect in the head rather than the torso as the latter would not stop a detonation and might even ignite the explosive.

Officers are also warned that potential bombers will detonate at the slightest inkling that they have been identified. This means they will not identify themselves until absolutely necessary.

One witness, Chris Wells, 28, a company manager, said he saw about 20 police officers, some armed, rushing into the station before a man jumped over the barriers with police giving chase.

In fact, by the time the armed officers arrived de Menezes was already heading down towards the train. It now seems certain that the man seen vaulting the barrier was one of the armed officers in hot pursuit. Another witness interviewed by the inquiry puts officers on the train before the shooting, glancing around the carriage and apparently searching for their suspect.

Once they were underground the officers were out of radio contact with colleagues and in a race against time to find de Menezes. When they did, the decision on what to do could not be referred to a senior officer. It was theirs alone.

In Israel, security forces try to isolate suicide bombers from the public so that, even if they do detonate their bombs, the human damage is minimal. But from the moment de Menezes entered the station, his fate was sealed.

Another witness, Mark Whitby, told of hearing people shouting, 'Get down, get own,' and then seeing de Menezes run onto the train 'looking like a cornered fox'. Three plainclothes police followed, one holding a black automatic pistol. De Menezes was tripped, pushed to the floor of the carriage and shot in the head seven times.

No one knows what went through the young man's mind in the last moments of his life. Having been attacked just weeks earlier, he may have believed the casually dressed white men chasing him were part of the same gang. He may have been thinking of the experience of his cousin who was caught by immigration officers in America and deported before he had the chance to finish saving for his dream home. Now de Menenzes is dead and no one will ever know.

The sun was sinking behind the mountains when the news of Jean Charles' death arrived in Corrego dos Ratos, on a Saturday afternoon. Jean's father Matosinho Otoni de Menezes, at 66 a scrawny slip of a man, had begun worrying earlier that day when he saw on the television news that a Brazilian had been killed in London.

When the mayor's car pulled into the narrow earth drive that leads up to the farmhouse, Matozinho immediately thought the worst.

'I already knew what he was going to say,' he recalls. 'I said to him: "It's fatal, isn't it?" He said: "Yes, it's about your son. He's been murdered."

'We lost our heads,' Matozinho says. 'We did not know what to do. They'd brought medical team with them since they knew we would be sick at the news. I asked the mayor if he was sure, but he didn't even need to reply. I could see it in his face.'

For the rest of the week in Gonzaga, in reality little more than a large village with a population of 5,500, appalled residents were busy plastering walls with placards bemoaning 'British brutality' and 'terrorism'. They made themselves busy, decorating Gonzaga's streets as a tribute to Jean with yellow and green crepe paper, using decorations left over from a recent carnival.

At dawn the following Thursday, a procession of cars drove 90 kilometres (56 miles) to Governador Valadares airport. Hundreds of mourners had gathered to see the arrival home of Jean's body, draping themselves over the thin perimeter fence to get a better view of the incoming Brazilian air force plane.

At 10.28am the plane shuddered down onto the runway and motored gently towards the crowds. Five minutes later, when a simply plywood coffin emerged from the back of the green plane, a stunned hush descended on the crowd.

'It was an execution - nothing more, nothing less,' Jean's cousin, Rubens de Menezes, says bluntly. 'I don't know what will happen to Dona Maria. What can you say to a mother who loses her son like this?'

If he was such a potential danger to the public why was de Menezes allowed to enter Stockwell tube station?

Police have already admitted that the officers who followed de Menezes from his home in Tulse Hill were not the same officers who fired the fatal shots. The surveillance team was unarmed and had to call in an armed unit to arrest de Menezes. The delay meant that de Menezes was already inside the tube station when the armed officers arrived. Should they not have been called earlier and attempted to apprehend him outside the station?

Did commanding officers give the order to shoot or was the decision taken 'on the ground'?

Although individual officers are allowed to use their weapons in order to protect their own lives or those of others, permission to deploy arms is usually obtained in advance. When de Menezes went underground the armed officers would have been out of radio contact with their superiors. It has since been reported that the first their commander knew of the shooting was a radio message declaring 'man down'. Why did the police radios not work in the station when British Transport Police are able to communicate underground? Did the lack of communication add to the tension?

Why is there no CCTV footage?

Cameras at Stockwell tube should have provided footage of the ticket halls, the escalators and the platforms. Most modern tube carriages also have cameras inside. Yet police say none of the cameras at Stockwell was working at the time of the shooting. This is despite London being on high alert and tube bosses being only too well aware of the importance of maintaining CCTV systems.

Why was the decision made to shoot?

Initial statements from the police said that de Menezes's 'clothing and actions' led to suspicions that he may have been concealing a bomb. Initial eyewitness reports suggested that he had been wearing a thickly padded jacket, despite the hot weather. One eyewitness even reporting seeing wires protruding from a padded belt. It has since emerged that de Menezes wore a normal denim jacket and that his electrician's belt had been left with a friend the night before.