Murdered? No, Menezes was a casualty of war

Jean-Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead by police in the immediate aftermath of the 2005 london transport bombings, was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. he was killed by firearms officers on a Tube train at stockwell after being mistaken for a member of a terror cell believed to be involved in a second suicide attack.

There have been a number of inquiries into his death and an inquest jury recorded an open verdict, after the coroner had already ruled out unlawful killing. The Crown Prosecution service decided that there was insufficient evidence, or public interest justification, to bring any criminal charges.

The Menezes family subsequently accepted a six-figure compensation settlement and the Metropolitan Police was fined £175,000 for breaches of health and safety laws.

and that should have drawn a line under this unfortunate business.

no one would claim this was scotland Yard’s finest hour. after it became apparent they’d shot the wrong man, the top brass at the Yard went into meltdown. The fall- out rightly hastened the end of former Commissioner Ian Blair’s turbulent career.

There have been conflicting claims and counter- claims about what went wrong on the day, some of them frankly absurd. as usual, there was an unsavoury whiff of cover-up. But this column has always maintained that the officers at the sharp end did what they were trained to do.

They were led to believe by those running the operation that Menezes was their target and once he boarded that train they had no option but to kill him. If he had been wearing a suicide belt, if he had detonated a bomb, the police would have been blamed for not preventing another atrocity.

They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.

That hasn’t stopped the Menezes family, egged on by the usual leftwing troublemakers, appealing to the european Court of human rights to overturn the CPs decision not to prosecute. If ever a case illustrated why we urgently need to pull out of the european yuman rites racket, this is it.

let’s remind ourselves of the background. On July 7, 2005, fifty-two people were murdered and hundreds more seriously injured in a series of Islamist terrorist bombings in london. Two weeks later, the day before Menezes was shot, there was another, abortive attack by a copycat crew of crazies.

londoners’ nerve ends were raw. People were frightened. The whole country was on high alert. Police and security services were under unimaginable pressure. london was a war zone. not a conventional war, admittedly, but still a war zone.

FOllOwInG the second, f ailed attack, the Met found evidence which led them to an address in south london, where they believed at least one of the terrorists was holed up. Menezes matched the description of the man they were looking for. That wasn’t his fault. Thousands of young men in london conform to a similar general description.

But he was the only one who lived at the address anti-terrorist officers had been given for one of the most wanted men in the country.

Menezes shared a flat with his cousin in the same block. Unfortu- nately, the police weren’t aware of that, so couldn’t eliminate him from their inquiries.

There’s still some confusion as to whether he was living here legally. he entered Britain on a six-month tourist visa in 2002 and then applied to stay on as a student.

a st a mp in hi s passport apparently giving him indefinite leave to remain bore no relation to any stamp used by the immigration authorities. we’ll probably never know the truth.

even if he was here illegally, the human rights act would almost certainly have prevented us sending him back to Brazil. right to family life, you name it, they’d have thought of something.

whatever his status, there was no record of anyone called JeanCharles de Menezes living at that address. so it is perhaps understandable that when he emerged f rom the building, the police mistook him for their target.

none of this in any way excuses or justifies his shooting, but it does help explain what led to it.

his death was a horrible case of mistaken identity, but he wasn’t — as his l awyers, his family and supporters claim — a victim of deliberate murder by agents of the state.

Jean- Charles de Menezes was another casualty of the war being waged against western civilisation by Islamist maniacs, a name to be added to those slaughtered everywhere from the Twin Towers in new York, to the Charlie hebdo offices in Paris, to the london Underground and beyond.

WhaTever happened on t hat fateful day, it took place on the streets of london, on British soil and should be under the sole jurisdiction of the British criminal justice system.

It shouldn’t be another cause celebre to be decided on the whim of unelected, unaccountable foreigners in strasbourg — some of them from former eastern european tyrannies, some of them not even lawyers. Call Me Dave promised to pull out of the european system and replace it with a British Bill of rights, but is now soft-pedalling. so what are you waiting for, Dave?

It would be an outrage if the european Court is allowed to reopen prosecution files against brave, blameless British police officers doing their utmost to prevent another full-scale loss of innocent life.

The operation went wrong, but the men who pulled the trigger were doing their duty. They’re not murderers and the decision not to bring charges against them was the right one.

They were acting with the best of intentions under the direction of commanders who were themselves under extreme pressure, trying to keep londoners safe from another bloody terrorist attack.

I’m sure if they could turn back the clock, they would. Tragically, in war zones mistakes happen.

Jean-Charles de Menezes wasn’t a terrorist and he didn’t deserve to die. he was merely the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

let’s just leave it there.