'Suicide Bomber' shooting - the verdict

[algarve addick]

My friend - yours is a whole new argument which should be on a different thread.
What has any of your essay got to do with my point - that the police in this country fucked up BIG TIME when killing De Menezes and violently assaulting and shooting 2 innocent men as they slept in their house?
Whether or not muslims in the UK get a fair deal or not has got FUCK ALL to do with these people getting wasted by the police - irrespective of whether they're Brazilian / Pakistani or whatever they deserved to go about their business without getting attacked in the name of law and order.
They (and De Menezes's next of kin) deserve full, unambiguous and unconditional public apologies from The Met and an appropriate compensation.Period.

[Flat_Eric]

Seems to me that some people here just love to have a pop at the police.

Like I said above - criticising and condemning from the safety of their own homes, all comfy behind their PCs with a cold beer and a packet of dry roast, no doubt - not out there at the sharp end with a split second to make a life or death decision.

I can only wonder if your condemnation of the murdering bastards who blew up three tube trains and a bus in London last summer was anything like as loud and vociferous.

[Officer Dibble]

What happened to the De Menezes geezer was a tragedy, a ghastly mistake. But he was shot dead 'in good faith'. There does not appear to have been any intent to kill him other than for the reason that the officers involved genuinely believed him to be a suicide bomber who was moments away from blowing up another tube train. They had no choice, the lives of innocent civilians were in the balance, the dude had to be unequivocally stopped, right there, right then, no messing. The problem was, they had the wrong geezer in their sights, and their 'intelligence' was anything but. It seems that there were serious shortcomings in surveillance and processing of intelligence in this instance - if questions need to be answered they need to be answered by the men in charge of this aspect of the case. The guys who shot De Menezes dead were simply doing what it said on the tin, they did their job bravely and efficiently and eliminated a man who had been fingered as that most lethal of terrorists - the suicide bomber.

However, the tragedy of this case was compounded by that PC wanker, Sir Ian Blair, pretending that he didn?t know the wrong dude had been shot. Thus making the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, the government, and Britain as a whole, look sleazy and underhand - like some wanky, corrupt, incompetent, third world country. But if he had just come out and said ?I?m afraid there has been the most awful mistake. The chap we shot turned out to be totally innocent. I and my men are so dreadfully, dreadfully, sorry.? Then folks would have immediately felt sympathy for him, his men, and indeed the DeMenezes family. No rational person would have blamed him, only those nutters with political axes to grind. Everyone else would have said ?Well, there but for the grace of God?? But instead he immediately tried to save his face and save his ass and save the wanky, politically correct, police policies that he was so keen on and that his men (and indeed any other no nonsense type of geezer) so despised. What a twat.


Officer Dibble

[Pervert]

That, Officer D, is the mine problem with the police these days----the higher echelons are filled with political animals more intent on their power base than anything else. Blair is just the most visible of the breed at the moment.

As for Flat Eric, why don't you do a search of the forum back to the London bombings and see how many of us cheered on the "brave martyrs."

[DavidS]

Your first paragraph summarises the situation very well. Nevertheless we cannot be sure what Sir Ian was told initially. Because of the alleged civil war that is going on in the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police, we can't be sure that Blair himself was not misled. Although the full truth is still a long way from entering the public arena, it is clear that the cock-up was by the survelliance team and possibly the operational commander, Cressida Dick, not the firearms officers who carried out the killing, who seemed to have acted in good faith.

[Sam Slater]

Keith wrote:

[quote]I think they probably could have bundled the guy without blowing his head off. I bet his hands were visible when they shot him, so no immediate risk of sudden suicide tactics.[/quote]

Keith, this really sounds to me like: you believe the police shot him for 'a laugh.'

Tell me I'm mis-interpreting your post..... !hmmm!