Court clears UK officials in 2005 de Menezes shooting

Europe’s top human rights court has ruled that British prosecutors were right not to charge police officers involved in the shooting 11 years ago of a Brazilian man they thought was a suicide bomber.

Electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was fatally shot seven times in the head by specialist firearms officers as he boarded an underground train at Stockwell station in south London on July 22nd, 2005.

He was killed the day after four Islamist militants tried unsuccessfully to bomb London's transport network. Police wrongly thought he was Hussein Osman, one of the attackers on the run, who lived in the same apartment block as de Menezes.

British security services were on a high state of alert as two weeks earlier four young British Muslims had killed 52 people and themselves in bombings on three underground trains and a bus in the most deadly peacetime attack in Britain.

Despite repeated demands from de Menezes’s family that the officers involved or their superiors be charged, prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to take action against any individuals.

“The decision not to prosecute any individual officer was not due to any failings in the investigation or the state’s tolerance of or collusion in unlawful acts,” the court said in its ruling.

“Following a thorough investigation, a prosecutor had considered all the facts of the case and concluded that there was insufficient evidence against any individual officer to prosecute.”

In 2007, the Metropolitan Police as an organisation was found guilty of breaching health and safety laws and fined £175,000 after the court heard it had made “shocking and catastrophic” blunders.

Lawyers for the British government told the European Court of Human Rights last June that the death could have been prevented and was the result of serious operational failures by police, but said the killing did not amount to murder.

The family argued that prosecutors were wrong not to charge any individuals, and that the health and safety offence was an inadequate punishment.

“We find it unbelievable that our innocent cousin could be shot seven times in the head by the Metropolitan Police when he had done nothing wrong and yet the police have not had to account for their actions,” Patricia Armani Da Silva, de Menezes’s cousin, said in a statement.

“We feel that decisions about guilt and innocence should be made by juries, not by faceless bureaucrats, and we are deeply saddened that we have been denied that opportunity yet again.”

A jury at an inquest in 2008 delivered an open verdict on the death, ruling that it was not a “lawful killing”, although the coroner had said the death could not be regarded as murder or manslaughter.