De Menezes family shocked at IPPC appointment
originally published:
1st November 2009
The Independent Police Complaints Commission has provoked shock and outrage by appointing an officer it criticised over the role he played in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Commander Moir Stewart, a top aide to former Metropolitan Police commissioner Ian Blair (pictured) at the time of Mr de Menezes’s shooting, has been appointed director of investigations at the IPCC, it was confirmed at the weekend.
Mr de Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the body at point-blank range by armed police aboard a Tube train at Stockwell station in 2005.
He had been mistaken for a failed suicide bomber during a bungled policing operation, for which the Metropolitan Police was convicted of “catastrophic failings.”
The IPCC report into the killing found that Mr Stewart and a fellow aide, Caroline Murdoch, had failed to inform the commissioner of a major development which strongly indicated the wrong man had been killed.
The IPCC did not find that there had been evidence of misconduct by Mr Stewart, however, saying his failure to inform his superior had been an “error of judgement.”
