By Ian Kirby
UNDERCOVER police forged vital surveillance evidence to cover up a crucial blunder that led to innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes being gunned down as a suspected Tube suicide bomber.
A logbook detailing the electrician’s last movements was altered by Special Branch officers to try and hide the fact that they had wrongly identified him as a terror suspect before he was shot seven times in the head on Stockwell station
Their deliberate cover-up meant the blame for de Menezes’ death would be pinned on Yard bosses and on the armed cops who actually fired the bullets—leaving them open to murder charges.
Amazingly it was not until 14 hours after the log was altered later after the debriefing that under-fire Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair was finally informed his officers had killed the wrong man.
The shock revelations are contained in the Independent Police Complaints Commission report into the shooting —which happened in the aftermath of last year’s 21/7 Tube bomb attempts.
The secret report, delivered 10 days ago, says the decision to send in an armed team to kill the wrongly- selected suspect came only after a positive identification by an undercover Special Branch surveillance team.
One of the SB officers mistakenly reported that de Menezes was alleged wanted terrorist Hussein Osman— being hunted for a “failed suicide bombing” on a Shepherd’s Bush tube train in the capital the previous day.
But, the report reveals, once it was realised an innocent man had been killed, the Special Branch surveillance log was altered to show that positive ID had been made.
(For more of this shocking story, please buy this week's News of the World.)
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