THE METROPOLITAN Police was rocked yesterday by an inquest jury's rejection of the police account of, and its delivery of an open verdict on, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Mr de Menezes's family had already branded the inquest "a complete whitewash" and accused coroner Sir Michael Wright of failure "on every count".
However, "Justice4Jean" campaigners cheered as the jury returned after six days of deliberation to reject police claims that the killing of the innocent 27-year-old Brazilian had been lawful.
Given an earlier instruction to the jury not to return a verdict of unlawful killing, a solicitor for the de Menezes family said yesterday's outcome was the best verdict they could hope for.
And while vowing that "justice has not been done yet", Mr Menezes's mother, Maria Otone de Menezes, said she felt "reborn" upon hearing it.
De Menezes was shot seven times by C12 firearms officers at Stockwell underground station on July 22nd, 2005, after they mistook him for failed suicide bomber Hussain Osman.
The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, Peter Smyth, said the pressure on officers had seldom, if ever, been greater than on that day at Stockwell 15 days after the suicide bombings that left 52 people dead and more than 700 injured on London's transport network, and just one day after a second failed terrorist attack on the capital.
"The expectation of a third bout of terrorism was high," said Mr Smyth. "The officers had not just their own safety to consider but that of hundreds of innocent Londoners who could have become the targets of what, on the information they had available, they believed to be a terrorist who could well have been on the point of mounting an attack.
"It was on this basis they took their fateful decisions. They believed they were doing the very best they could."
The majority of the jury, however, did not believe officers shouted "armed police" before opening fire. They also concluded that six factors caused the death of de Menezes, including a failure to obtain and provide better photographic images of terror suspect Osman for the surveillance team, and a failure by police to ensure that de Menezes was stopped before reaching public transport.
The acting commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, meanwhile, admitted that "in the face of enormous challenges that day" the force had "made a most terrible mistake".
At the same time the Independent Police Complaints Commission called for a review of operational procedures for police dealing with the threat of suicide terrorism.
Commission chair Nick Hardwick said: "The death of Jean Charles de Menezes was a truly shocking event. An entirely innocent man, on his way to work, was shot and killed by armed police while he sat on a Tube train. We now know there was nothing in his actions which justified his fate. He had no opportunity to defend himself or protest his innocence."
Repeating the commission's sincere sympathies to the de Menezes family, Mr Hardwick went on to call for a much greater scrutiny of how police should respond to the threat of suicide terrorism.
Lawyers for the de Menezes family confirmed that a judicial appeal against the coroner's ruling against a finding of unlawful killing is ongoing.
Having concluded in 2006 that there was "insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction against any individual police officer", a spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service said they would consider the inquest verdict and any fresh evidence carefully "and decide whether we need to review our decision."