The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: New border politics?

At 10.05 on 22 July 2005 UK anti-terrorist officers killed Jean Charles de Menezes on board a stationary underground train at Stockwell Station in South London by firing 11 rounds at close range (seven bullets entered his head, one bullet entered his shoulder and three bullets missed) (Daily Telegraph 2005). Five-and-a-half hours after the shooting, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair issued a statement in which he claimed that the operation had been ‘directly linked’ to ongoing investigations into the attempted bombings in central London the previous day (ibid.). At that time, Ian Blair announced that the person shot dead at Stockwell had been acting suspiciously and was challenged by police but refused to obey instructions (BBC News Online 2005a). However, in a statement the following day the Commissioner announced that a ‘mistake’ had been made and that there was no evidence to connect Menezes with the attempted bombings or any other ‘terrorist’ activity (Blair in NBC News 2005). Six months later, following the completion of the first part of the inquiry into the shooting by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), Ian Blair commented:

In a terrible way, the Met was transfixed on other things. It was transfixed on: where are these bombers? And therefore, in a dreadful way, we didn’t see the significance of that. That was our mistake. It was. It was a bad mistake.