de Menexes : Police failed to tape Tube killing orders

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Police failed to tape Tube killing orders

The truth about errors that led to the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes may never be known because officers failed to tape conversations in their control room, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Hastily scribbled notes are the only evidence received by the Independent Police Complaints Commission to support senior officers' accounts of the minutes before de Menezes was shot at Stockwell Underground station on July 22 last year.

Police mistakenly identified him as one of the men suspected of attempting to bomb the Underground the day before. It is common practice for all communications in and out of police control rooms to be recorded.

The failure to tape converstions between officers chasing de Menezes and their commanders at Scotland Yard is said to be due to lack of space at the time in control rooms with recording faciliities, which were crammed with detectives hunting the bombers.

It means that there is no indisputable record of what Commander Cressida Dick, the officer responsible for the firearms unit, and Commander John McDowell, the officer in charge of the surveillance teams, told their subordinates to do.

When the de Menezes crisis began to unfold, officers dealing with it struggled to find their own room.

When it became apparent that there was no means of taping communications in the room they had chosen, one of them was told to write down what was said, by whom and when.

The revelation is likely to fuel further accusations of a cover up surrounding the shooting of the innocent Brazilian electrician. It follows a bitter row over 'gaps' in the CCTV footage at the station at the time of his death.

London Underground insists its cameras were working, but police claim there is no film of de Menezes's final moments. The Crown Prosecution Service is now even more likely to conclude that there is insufficient evidence to support criminal charges against the officers involved.

Asad Rahman, spokesman for the de Menezes family, said: 'This is another blow to Jean Charles's family. I doubt everything was written down, not out of malice, but because so much was happening. It is a damaging indictment of the mangaement at Scotland Yard.'

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: 'As we are still under investigation we are not in a position to comment.'

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