Menezes shooting: 'catastrophic errors'

The shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes was, in the words of the prosecution today, a shocking and catastrophic error by the Metropolitan Police, which was ultmately avoidable.

The Brazilian electrician's family sat in the public gallery as the case unfolded of a police operation in the hunt for the 21/7 bombers that was mired in confusion and miscommunication. It was an operation, the jury were told, that was fundamentally flawed.

But this trial is not about the actual shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes - the two firearms officers officers involved are not being called to give evidence - but about the events that led up to it.

Opening the case for the Crown, Clair Montgomery QC said: "Jean Charles was at risk of being shot dead and members of the public were at risk of being injured - not because of a momentary mistake by an officer or officers. These risks occurred because the police failed to follow the strategy that had been decided upon hours before Jean Charles came out of his front door in Scotia Road at 9.33."

Watching Scotia Road was a surveillance team with orders not to stop and question people leaving. That was the duty of a firearms team, which took four-and-a-half hours to arrive on the scene.

Ms Montgomery told the court: "We suggest that there was no good reason for this state of affairs. Nothing that the firearms officers did between 4.55 and 9.30 - which included getting their weapons and being briefed, driven across London, even filling up with petrol - appears to have justified leaving the address of a suicide bomber watched only by lightly armed surveillance officers with no orders to intervene."

The court heard confusion on the ground appeared to be mirrored among senior officers in the control room, called Room 1600 at New Scotland Yard.

The prosecution presented a scenario, not of a calm and controlled environment, but of tactical decisions being made amid chaos.

Ms Montgomery said: "The atmospshere in the overcrowded room as officers from other departments, many of whom had no real business being there, crowded into the room to see what was going on. The operations room was noisy and chaotic. The officer who was supposed to monitor the surveillance commentary had great difficulty in hearing the radio transmissions of the surveillance officers."

The many failures, the prosecution added, endangered the lives of the public. The police had, the jury were told, stood back and allowed a suspected suyicide bomber to travel on a packed bus, then enter a busy tube station having done nothing to reduce that risk. In fact, they, not as indiviuals but as a cooporation, had actually increased it.

An early attempt to stop the bus Jean Charles was on involved an officer driving up behind with his siren on and his lights flashing. On the train, if Jean Charles had been a suicide bomber, the court heard, he would have detonated his bomb well before firearms officers entered the carriage. The fact he was not a bomber, the prosecution said, is not a defence for the Office of Metropolitian Police Commissioner.

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