Monday, January 30, 2006
Special Branch cover-up their role in innocent man's death
This is a shocking bit of news.A police watchdog has found Special Branch officers launched a cover-up to conceal their fatal role in the shooting of inocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station.
According to a report in The News Of The World, undercover police tried to change a surveillance log to hide the fact they had mistakenly identified the 27-year-old electrician as a suspected suicide bomber.
As a result blame for the tragedy would have been shifted to senior Scotland Yard commanders or the armed police who pulled the trigger.
The claimed leak of the IPCC report - handed over to the Crown Prosecution Service 10 days ago - revealed de Menezes was only shot after he was wrongly identified as suspected suicide bomber Hussein Osman by an undercover Special Branch team.
However, once they realised their fatal error, officers altered the log to show that no positive identification had been made.
A "Whitehall source" is quoted as saying: "It says the log was actually tampered with in a major way.
"In particular the words AND and NOT were inserted about the Osman ID, so it read 'and it was not Osman' rather than 'it was Osman'."
The log was apparently tampered with at a debriefing meeting 10 hours after the shooting.
It had been produced by colleagues of the officers listening to the team's radio messages.
During the evening debriefing, the officers on the ground were allowed to check it for errors - but crucially, the alterations were not signed.
A spokesman for the de Menezes family launched a scathing attack on the British authorities for keeping them "in the dark" - and said the latest revelations added to their beliefs the shooting had been shrouded by "lies and deception".
It's all so very murky but is anybody really surprised at the actions of Special Branch? The people of Ireland have had to deal with collusion between Special Branch and loyalist paramilitaries for decades.
Perhaps this incident will highlight to the British people just how dangerous Special Branch really are.
I hope that the Menezes family get justice for their murdered relative.
# posted by United Irelander @ 12:00 AM 
© 2008 United Irelander.
