Campaigners voice horror at new IPCC appointment
originally published:
30th November 2009
Campaigners have slammed the appointment of the top Scotland Yard officer who was personally criticised for failings in the high profile Jean Charles de Menezes shooting.
Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was an electrician from Sao Paulo. He was shot seven times in the head and once in the body at point blank range by armed police while aboard a tube train at Stockwell Tube station on 22 July 2005. His wallet was later searched and revealed his Brazilian identification.
Commander Stewart was the top aide to former metropolitan police commissioner, Ian Blair at the time of De Mendes’s shooting. The investigation by the IPCC into the killing, which lasted two years and cost £300,000, found Stewart had failed to tell Blair of a ‘major’s; development, which suggested the wrong man, had been shot.
The report said that, within minutes, news that an innocent man had been killed, had reached the Commissioner’s office and his chief of staff. However Sir Ian Blair told a press conference and was later reported in the News of the world that: ‘I and everybody who advised me believed that the person who was shot was a suicide bomber’s.
