The Observer’s Rafael Behr puts it bluntly:
> A man slips on his denim jacket (unimpeded by explosives of any sort) and steps outside. He gets a bus to his local metropolitan railway station. He enters the station using the conventional, unathletic ticket-in-barrier walk-in method. He goes down to the platform, runs for a train and gets on it. He is then shot repeatedly in the head by armed police.
> It all raises certain questions about the judgement of our senior law enforcement officers.
Five weeks after the shooting at Stockwell Tube station, the truth about the events that lead to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes is finally beginning to emerge.
And it doesn’t look good for the Met. An investigation by The Observer, published last Sunday, has raised fresh questions about de Menezes’ killing: key errors were made by the surveillance team; security cameras were mysteriously not working; new testimony suggests he walked calmly through the station and to the platform, unchallenged; a photo of the scene of the shooting released by leaked from the Met Police shows a man wearing a light denim jacket, not a padded winter coat.
At the same time, it also emerged that Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair tried to halt the independent investigation into the affair. Allegations of a cover-up abound.
The more evidence that comes to light, the less this incident seems like an accident and the more it looks like manslaughter, at best — or at worst, murder. If the armed officers involved, not to mention their superiors, don’t face any charges or disciplinary action for their part in this horrendous warping of justice, there could be some serious trouble ahead.