Scotland Yard should apologise directly to the families caught up a 2006 anti-terror raid who were put through a "terrifying experience", the UK's police watchdog said today.
At least two of the 11 occupants of the raided houses were struck during the June 2nd, 2006, raid, one of them over the head, by officers who employed "very aggressive" tactics, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said.
The IPCC said the families were "victims of failed intelligence" and criticised Scotland Yard for its handling of the operation, during which one innocent man was shot and injured by police.
Statement by families of victims
The police watchdog has spent several months investigating claims of assault, unlawful arrest and detention by the occupants of the two raided houses.
Both properties, numbers 46 and 48 in Lansdown Road, Forest Gate, east London, were searched by police officers hunting for a suspected chemical bomb.
The IPCC has already done an inquiry into the shooting of one of the two brothers arrested in the raid. It ruled that the shooting was an accident, the result of contact on a narrow staircase between the man, Mohammed Abdul Kahar, and the police officer.
Mr Kahar, a Muslim, later claimed he was kicked in the face by a police officer, slapped and dragged down a stairway by his foot. His family also complained that their house was completely pulled apart by the police during the raid.
Mr Kahar and his brother, Abul Koyair, were arrested during the raid and held for several days before being released without charge after officers found nothing in the house.
Today's IPCC report comes amid increasing tension between the police and the Muslim community. Last week, one of the men arrested during the Birmingham anti-terror raids said Muslims in Britain were now living in a "police state".
The families caught up in the 2006 raid said today that their lives had been devastated by the "entirely false information" given to the police about them.
Following the publication of the IPCC report, the families said there had been no examination of how police assessed the intelligence before the raid, which "seriously endangered" the life of one of those targeted.
They also raised concerns there had been no investigation into the "clear attempt to pervert the course of justice" committed by the informant who provided the information, or into unfavourable leaks to the press.
The families had been the victims of a "crime of the utmost seriousness" and had been denied justice because of the failure to investigate that crime, they said.
A statement issued through their lawyers said: "It is completely clear that a crime of the utmost seriousness was committed on or before the 2nd June 2006.
"An unnamed informant, or informants, provided entirely false information to the police, described in the IPCC report as intelligence, which led to the catastrophic events of the 2nd June.
"The lives of several law abiding individuals were devastated, and the life of one of them seriously endangered as a direct result of that information."
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Alf Hitchcock , of the Metropolitan Police's Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate, said that "faced with the intelligence we had, the operation was necessary and proportionate and had at its heart a commitment to protect the public.
"The IPCC came to this conclusion after having been provided with full access to all the available and relevant intelligence.
"The police then have to take very difficult operational decisions which, in this case, have been examined by the IPCC and have been found to be necessary and proportionate," Mr Hitchcock said.
He said the IPCC report was "thorough and independent" and concluded that the majority of allegations against the police were unsubstantiated.
PA