Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer QC approved a decision not to prosecute any police officers over the shooting. Menezes' cousin Vivian Figueiredo said the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) move was "deeply upsetting."

She said the family will turn their energy to lobbying Parliament on the laws surrounding police accountability.

Ms Figueiredo observed: "We are all in shock and simply cannot understand how the deliberate killing of an innocent man and an attempt by the Metropolitan police to cover it up does not result in a criminal offense.

"We condemn the CPS decision and reject the logic of their argument. The inquest put the truth out there for all the public to see, but the authorities want us to forget the truth to stop us getting justice. But we will never forget."

Prosecutors conducted an extensive review of the evidence presented at the three-month inquest into his death last year. But they found insufficient evidence to pursue the officers who pulled the trigger or those who oversaw the operation for manslaughter or gross negligence.

Menezes was shot dead by two marksmen after boarding a train at Stockwell Tube Station on July 22, 2005, after he was mistaken for suicide bomber Hussain Osman. The incident happened a few days after the terrorist bombing of London.

An inquest jury returned an open verdict last December after hearing three months of evidence. Coroner Sir Michael Wright was criticized in December for ruling out unlawful killing as a possible verdict

Mercopress

Nearly 200 people packed a lecture theater at the London School of Economics (LSE) for the official launch of the Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign on October 10. De Menezes, a young Brazilian worker, was shot dead by police at London’s Stockwell underground station on July 22, the victim of a shoot-to-kill policy instigated in secret by the police and sanctioned by the British government.

The Family Campaign is calling for an investigation into the circumstances of Jean Charles’s death, both to ensure justice and to prevent similar deaths in future. The meeting heard the harrowing words of Maria Ambrosia da Silva, de Menezes’ mother, speaking publicly for the first time since the killing of her son, when she said that justice “must and will be done.” “I do not want,” she said, “any other mother to suffer as I have done.”

In the immediate aftermath of the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, there was a systematic campaign of disinformation aimed at justifying the policy of summary execution. Although the police denied feeding false information to compliant sections of the media, many of the stories that circulated could only have come from official sources.

It was claimed that de Menezes had been identified leaving the house of a suspected terrorist, wearing an unseasonably heavy overcoat. On his arrival at Stockwell Underground rail station, he supposedly vaulted the ticket barrier and attempted to flee police. Police identified themselves and shot him because of fears that he was carrying a bomb. Some witnesses claimed to have seen wires sticking out of his clothes.

All of these stories were proved to be lies.

In fact, de Menezes had left his communal block of flats wearing a denim jacket. He took a 20-minute bus ride to the station, where he picked up a free paper and entered by using his season ticket. He went slowly down the escalator.

At no point did he run from police, because the officers were in plain clothes and never identified themselves. He was not even aware that he was being followed.

When he reached the platform he entered the train and sat down. At this point he was shot seven times in the head, and once in the shoulder, at point-blank range with no prior warning. Three other shots missed.

On the basis of false stories, press reports stated definitively that de Menezes was a suicide bomber implicated in the bomb attempts of July 21. The police only informed the family of his death some 30 hours later. His cousins, who lived with Jean Charles, were corralled in a hotel room by police and interrogated. The telephone was not working, so they were unable to ring their family in Brazil.

As it became clear that de Menezes was an innocent man, the police worked overtime to limit the political fallout from their murderous actions.

Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, stalled an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for five days. Instead, he promised an internal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. The IPCC has a statutory duty to investigate. The Metropolitan Police also announced that CCTV footage from Stockwell station was missing.

A deputation, led by Deputy Assistance Commissioner John Yates, went to Brazil to visit de Menezes’ family and offer them a £15,000 “ex gratia” payment. The police insisted that the meeting had to take place without the family lawyer being present. When the family said they would be happy to discuss with the police, but were waiting for the arrival of their lawyer, the deputation left.

The Family Campaign is demanding to know the full facts of what happened on July 22. Its central demands are for a swift conclusion to the IPCC investigation, with the publication of its findings, and for appropriate criminal charges being brought against those responsible.

The family is also calling for a full judicial public inquiry to investigate the police operation that culminated in the murder of de Menezes, police actions following his death, and the shoot-to-kill policy itself.

Gareth Peirce, the family’s lawyer, told the meeting that de Menezes’ family had been asking from the outset all the relevant questions that the police still needed to answer. How could Jean Charles have been identified as a suspect? If he was a suspect, how could he have been allowed to take a bus and enter the station? How could his execution have been lawful?

She pointed to the new waves of anti-terrorist legislation being promulgated by the government, and said that the country already has more than it needs. She asked whether the police use the existing legislation properly, and whether new legislation was being proposed for propaganda purposes? At the same time, she said, there is an extra-parliamentary culture of police policy, as witnessed in the shoot-to-kill policy.

Peirce noted that Sir John Stevens, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had boasted in his newspaper column of introducing the policy when he had previously been employed investigating shoot-to-kill operations in Northern Ireland.

She also drew attention to the forthcoming debate in the House of Lords on the use of evidence extracted by torture, and the deliberate policy of returning people to countries that employ torture.

The most far-reaching historical overview came from Amnesty International’s Livio Zilli, who noted that Britain has a long history of allegations of unlawful killings that have never been resolved.

Amnesty is demanding a mechanism for independent investigations: it expressed particular concern over police attempts to block the IPCC’s investigation. The fact that the IPCC had not opposed the actions of the police towards the IPCC raised concerns that it was susceptible to pressure from the Metropolitan Police, and possibly the Home Office.

Matthew Taylor MP, former chair of the Liberal Democrats, was most concerned that repressive legislation had been introduced without Parliament providing it with a fig leaf of legitimacy. He justified shoot-to-kill operations, stating, “Of course, we all understand” that under certain circumstances “it may be … reasonable to use lethal force.”

He regretted, however, the lack of parliamentary debate on the shoot-to-kill policy. Had it been debated in Parliament, he said, he would have opposed it. If it had then gone through Parliament, though, it would have had “some kind of legitimacy,” however unpalatable.

Several speakers drew attention to other victims of police killings and repression. Susan Alexander, the mother of Azelle Rodney, compared her son’s case to that of Jean Charles de Menezes. Rodney, an innocent man, was also smeared in the press after he was shot in the head by police in April this year.

The postmortem was rushed and the family was not notified. Ms. Alexander expressed her lack of confidence in the IPCC, noting that the officer involved in the death of her son had still not been interviewed.

The human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger drew attention to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s demands for more Draconian legislation on the grounds that the rules of engagement with terrorists have changed. Jagger noted that this marked a reintroduction of the death penalty by the back door, as the British government had rejected political debate.

In the debate that followed, a speaker from the floor argued that all the police commissioners involved should be prosecuted for conspiracy to murder, along with Home Secretary Charles Clarke. A friend of the de Menezes family said that it was “impossible” for them to have any dealings with the police because of the lies and obstruction. One speaker, who had been in Tavistock Square on July 7 when a bomb exploded on a bus, said that not all victims of terrorism supported the shoot-to-kill policy or were uncritical of it.

A question was asked about the intervention of two Brazilian government representatives.

It was pointed out that the representatives had made no effort to contact the de Menezes family. They were, said one speaker, pursuing their own political agenda. There has been much discussion of the British government having adopted a shoot-to-kill policy already practiced in Brazil. It was noted by a local politician from São Paulo that some 500 to 800 people are shot dead each year in that city alone.

Originally published by the World Socialist Web site – www.wsws.org.

British radio presenter Carolyn Quinn interviewed Tim Cahill from Amnesty International at her Today show on Radio 4 about the pressure the Brazilian government is putting on the British police to investigate the death of Brazilian national, Jean Charles de Menezes, mistakenly killed by the Scotland Yard.

According to Amnesty International, more than a thousand people were killed by police, in 2003, in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone. This would show Brazil has little authority to demand torough investigation when they have a dismal record when it comes to investigating police killings in Brazil.

Carolyn Quinn: While the family of Jean Charles de Menezes – the innocent man shot dead on the Underground – continues to mourn their son, Brazilian officials have been in London carrying out their own inquiries into how the electrician was mistaken for a suicide bomber.

Tim Cahill from Amnesty International: We’re extremely concerned by the situation in Brazil, but I think it’s important for us to just precede that by saying that Amnesty International doesn’t do any kind of hierarchies in terms of human rights.

The situation in Brazil shouldn’t in any way minimize the concern that Amnesty feels for the case of Jean Charles de Menezes. However, the level of killings by police in Brazil has long been denounced by Amnesty International, and has long been documented by us, and the failure by the authorities to investigate and put an end to these has long been a concern.

For example, two cases were denounced yesterday, in Rio de Janeiro, one involving people in a community in the outskirts of Rio, where five people were killed in questionable circumstances, and another one when an 11-year-old boy was killed in the community of Josenia.

We’re urging the authorities to investigate these, and to show the same concern that they’re showing for the de Menezes case, and respect all Brazilians’ human rights.

CQ: There are reports of police going through the city’s poor suburbs firing at random. What image does the concept of human rights have in Brazil? Do people respect it?

TC: One of the great problems at the moment is that human rights has a very negative image. It’s seen as the protection of criminals, a way   of negating the rights of other citizens in their protection against the very high level of crimes that exist in the country today. So there is a feeling – a popular feeling – amongst many people that violent methods of policing are justified in the fight against crime.

CQ: Yet the British police have been training Brazilian police in human rights.

TC: This is the point, and a very important point. Britain has been one of the leading countries in terms of promoting good policing in Brazil, and promoting the idea that actually through professional policing you can get more effective security and at the same time more effective human rights.

Scotland Yard chief Sir Ian Blair says that he did not know his officers had shot an innocent man until 24 hours after Jean Charles de Menezes was killed.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner said he first learned the 27-year-old had no connection to the attempted London transport system bombings of July 21 when a colleague told him words to the effect: “Houston, we have a problem”.

In an interview with the News of the World newspaper, Sir Ian said he immediately thought: “That’s dreadful, what we are going to do about that?”

The force has been accused of a cover-up after leaked documents from the investigation into the Brazilian’s death appeared to contradict earlier police and witness accounts of the incident at Stockwell tube station.

Menezes, an electrician, was gunned down by armed police after being mistaken for a terrorist by armed police, a day after the attempted bomb attacks.

Relatives of the victim have called on Sir Ian to resign but he has received backing from Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

“I am very happy with the conduct, not only of Sir Ian Blair, but the whole Metropolitan Police in relation to this inquiry,” he told the BBC.

“From the public order events, through to the investigation of the terrible atrocities on July 7 and 21, the Metropolitan Police have done very well.”

Mr Clarke added: “Obviously the death of Mr. de Menezes is a terrible tragedy as everybody acknowledges, and it needs to be very properly and fully investigated, which is what the Independent – I emphasize the Independent – Police Complaints Commission is doing and will do.”

Scotland Yard denied a report that it had offered Mr de Menezes’s family one million dollars in compensation.

This article appeared originally in Mercopress – www.mercopress.com.

Documents and photographs leaked to ITV News demonstrate that the entire story used by the police, the media and the government to excuse the killing of the young Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London was a lie.

On every important detail, what the public were told was a fabrication. Rather than the accidental victim of an anti-terror operation, de Menezes was deliberately targeted for state execution.

The aim of this operation was to send a message to the British public that democratic rights count for nothing – a message that was made explicit by Prime Minister Tony Blair when he declared that the “rules of the game” have now changed.

In the immediate aftermath of de Menezes’ killing on July 22, media reports, supposedly backed by eyewitnesses, claimed that the young Brazilian had been seen leaving the home of a suspected terrorist wearing a bulky overcoat on a hot day.

When challenged by police at Stockwell subway station, he had attempted to run, jumping a ticket barrier, before being overpowered and shot multiple times in the head in order to prevent the possible detonation of a bomb.

Statements and photographs leaked from the official Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) being held into the shooting show that none of this is true.

De Menezes left his flat and boarded a bus on his way to work, from which point he was placed under surveillance and followed. The only reason given for this by the police is that he had “Mongolian eyes” and looked like a suspect. Also contrary to previous claims, everything that took place at Stockwell station was captured on CCTV. This footage shows:

* De Menezes was not wearing a belt or jacket that could have concealed weapons – he was wearing a denim jacket.

* At no point was he challenged by the police, all of whom were in plain clothes. This flatly contradicts the statement made by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair that he refused to obey police instructions.

* De Menezes did not leap over the ticket barrier to the underground station where the shooting took place but entered normally. He did not run away from the police, as he was completely unaware he was being followed. Rather, he picked up a free newspaper as he slowly descended the elevator to the platform.

* De Menezes did not trip or stumble as he ran on to the train in an attempt to evade arrest, thus allowing police to “capture” him. Instead he had boarded the train and was seated when he was shot through the head.

At this point accounts in the documents differ slightly as to what happened. One version states that a police officer walked up to de Menezes and, without warning, shot him repeatedly in the head. Another paints a conflicting but equally chilling picture.

A policeman from the surveillance team who was following de Menezes states: “I heard shouting which included the word ‘police’ and turned to face the male in the denim jacket…

“He immediately stood up and advanced towards me and the CO19 [firearms squad] officers…. I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side.

“I then pushed him back on to the seat where he had been previously sitting…. I then heard a gun shot very close to my left ear and was dragged away on to the floor of the carriage.”

Even if this version of events is true, there was no reason to shoot de Menezes as he was restrained and could not explode a bomb.

ITV News showed photographs of the dead man lying on the floor inside the train with blood on the seat where he had been sitting. He was not shot five times in the head as the press said at the time. According to ITV News, he was shot eight times, seven in the head and one in the shoulder, at close range by two firearms officers.

No one has taken responsibility for wrongly identifying de Menezes as a terrorist. The officer responsible for operating the surveillance cameras targeting the block of flats claims that he was “relieving” himself when de Menezes left home and asked for someone else to check his identity.

However, it is clear that someone at the highest level had taken the decision to implement the shoot-to-kill policy secretly developed more than two years ago – using the pretext provided by the July 7 terror bombings in London.

The papers state that “gold command made the decision and gave appropriate instructions that de Menezes was to be prevented from entering the tube system. At this stage the operation moved to code red tactic, responsibility was handed over to CO19.”

Gold command, based at Metropolitan Police headquarters, is the secretive body charged with giving the go-ahead for shoot-to-kill operations under what is known as “Operation Kratos.”

The documents quote the commanding officer of CO19 as telling his team “that they may be required to use unusual tactics today because of the environment they were in.” Asked to clarify, he is reported to have replied: “If we were deployed to intercept a subject and there was an opportunity to challenge, but if the subject was noncompliant, a critical shot may be taken.”

Events demonstrate that de Menezes was never given a chance to comply with the police. Right up to the moment he was killed, he could have had no idea of what was about to happen to him. Contrary to stated policy, no attempts were made to stop him when he left his flat and board a bus to the train station, even though he was supposed to be a potential terrorist.

Immediate responsibility for de Menezes’ killing must be laid at the door of the firearms squad and their commanding officers. But political guilt for this crime rests squarely with the Blair government.

Not only did the government covertly establish new guidelines allowing police to act as judge, jury and executioner. They subsequently justified de Menezes’ killing and unconditionally defended the police by endorsing a version of events now exposed as a pack of lies.

They could do so with impunity because they knew that no one within the political establishment or the media would challenge them, particularly under conditions where a concerted campaign was being waged to insist that national unity was the only permitted response in the aftermath of the July 7 bombings.

Even after the ITV News revelations, not a single Labour or opposition member of parliament was prepared to speak out. All accepted the official line of the police and the government that any comment would prejudice the Complaints Commission inquiry.

Such claims are cynical in the extreme. All that will emerge from the IPCC is a cover-up. In the meantime, the silence of the political establishment and the media enables the government to put in place all the elements for a police state.

Working people must draw the most fundamental lessons from the assassination of Jean Charles de Menezes. An entirely innocent man, whose only crime was to live in the wrong block of flats, was summarily executed with no one held to account.

Moreover, Metropolitan Police Chief Blair has made clear that the same “code red tactic” implemented in the murder of de Menezes was used on seven other occasions in the recent period, and in each case police came close to opening fire.

The abrogation of democratic rights has reached the point where the type of death squads associated with South American dictatorships or with Britain’s occupation of Northern Ireland are being used on the streets of London.

And things will not end there. Measures announced by Blair on August 5 will be used to criminalise all forms of political dissent. The government intends to give itself unprecedented powers to deport and exclude any foreign national or naturalised citizen it deems a potential security threat and to extend the use of virtual house arrest against British citizens.

It will be able to ban organisations and publications on the vague pretext that they “condone” terrorism, and close places of worship. It will respond to any legal challenge to these proposals by abrogating the Human Rights Act.

Those responsible for the de Menezes killing must be brought to account. But this cannot be accomplished by relying on the IPCC or any other legal body.

The lies employed to justify the state execution of de Menezes are only a link in the chain of lies used by the British and US governments to justify their predatory war in Iraq and ongoing “war against terror.”

Both London and Washington have developed a modus operandi that is not limited by any commitment to traditional democratic norms. Opposed by a majority of the population, these governments uphold the interests of a tiny financial elite that seek to enrich themselves through rapacious plunder of the world’s resources and the ever more brutal exploitation of the working class.

The imposition of these policies, which are antithetical to the interests of the vast majority of the population, cannot be reconciled with the preservation of democracy. It demands new forms of rule based in the most profound sense on lawlessness and criminality. This is what now confronts working people.

Everything depends on the development of an independent political movement of the working class, the axis of which must be opposition to the profit system – that is the source of the drive towards war and the assault on civil liberties.

The document above is a Statement by the Socialist Equality Party (Britain)

A professor at the Department of International Law at Brazil’s University of BrasÀ­lia, Cristiano Paixão, says that the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year old Brazilian, who was shot by London police who thought he was a terrorist, should not cause diplomatic problems between Brazil and England.

“Today’s world is united around a series of global issues and one of them is the fight against terrorism,” said Paixão. However, he added, that does not mean that incident did not anger many Brazilians.

Menezes had lived in England for five years where he worked as an electrician. On Friday, July 22, a day after terrorists had attempted to explode bombs on London subways and buses for the second time, he was shot in a subway station when the police thought he was another suicide bomber.

“This was a disastrous police action. We can only deplore and lament it,” said professor Paixão, adding that it does not alleviate the pain for Brazilians to know that the terrible mistake was the result of racial profiling that is used in most of Europe.

“They identify suspects by physical features. Someone with blonde hair and blue eyes is much less likely to be a suspect.”

Jean Charles de Menezes will be buried in his hometown of Gonzaga, Minas Gerais, this afternoon.

ABr

The 27-seven-year-old Brazilian born electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by an anti-terrorist hit squad in London on Friday July 22. Seven bullets pierced his skull and shattered his brain, while the impact of an eighth snapped his spine.

His death has left a poor, rural family grieving, and tens of thousands of Brazilian immigrants and students in England outraged.

In the immediate aftermath to his murder, his shocked cousin, Alexandre Pereira, could not control his fury. The powers granted by the English government to preemptively murder potential suicide bombers abide by the same logic as the atrocities committed by American and British forces in Iraq, he went to assert.

The English government is well rehearsed in the use of these emergency powers endowed by the State to use against citizens and foreigners alike. Methods implemented in Northern Ireland and Iraq have been turned to the homeland.

But Jean Charles was neither Arab, Pakistani, nor Muslim. On July 22, after leaving his home to go to work, he was followed by a gang he could not have suspected consisted of law enforcement agents.

No crime he may have committed on his commute can justify his brutal murder, nor the State’s claim to a monopoly on using murder legally. Jean Charles’ ethnic and national background had nothing to do with Iraq.

Brazilians have continually manifested their opposition to the invasion and occupation of that country. Nor did his religious faith have anything to do with Islam. But his death will not have been in vain, for it has provided the Muslim committee with some breathing space to keep their pride.

As Bush did before him, by transforming the terrorist attacks of July 10 into England’s 9/11, Blair is taking advantage of civil panic to settle scores. His press conference of July 26 was by far the most international in tenor since his unequivocal support of Bush and Sharon’s military plans for the Middle East. He insisted, gnarled and beat away at any attempt to, in his words, “justify” the terror attacks. Yet his pose merely cast the pathetic silhouette of a shadow boxer.

As with 9/11, the acts were performed by human beings. Some of these individuals were devoted community workers. The fact that some of them were British citizens simply underscores how close Europe is, unlike North America, to the Middle East and North Africa, and how deeply history is able to tear events away from a compressed present.

These individuals thought over their acts, planned them, and executed them. Part of the plan, criminally involving the murder of innocent civilians, involves paying for the act with their own lives.

Also like 9/11, coming to terms with the horror of these choices is an act by which citizens strive to understand the grounds of revolt, mad and blind as they may be. Such pondering has nothing whatsoever to do with “justifying”. Blair’s tough guy performance could not intimidate any would-be suicide bombers. Instead, he meant to threaten anyone opposing his militaristic state-terror policies in Iraq.

Deliberative democracy has no counts to pay to authoritarian longings. All citizens have an inalienable right to condemn their government’s criminal actions, and to insist upon accountability.

That the criminal acts of a handful of individuals will have comprised the social standing and peaceful desire of Muslims for full integration into British culture and life will be the responsibility of Blair’s ignoble cowardice for supporting his country’s big corporate interests (oil and guns) over the lives of innocent civilians in Iraq – and England.

For the warnings were clear. The nature of this war has changed with the miniaturization of weaponry and explosives. In their colonial wars, the European powers condemned as terrorists those who employed guerrilla war tactics to organize the subjected unarmed population.

To their acts the European powers, England and France, then the United States, in Kenya, Algerian, Indochina, Korea and Vietnam, bombed rifle shooters from the air, and slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians “just for the example”. But the powers learned the strategy of guerrilla warfare and taught their future officers the secrets they learned from defeat.

Against infrared technological sighting, organized revolt has grown even harder. The road has been opened to the shocking and dismal path of self-sacrifice while pulling the innocent down into hell, in the belief that heaven waits at the end of the spirit’s road.

Regardless of the religious convictions behind jihad, political solutions favorable to the Muslim populations of the Middle East have never fit the Anglo-American equation.

With the G7 population’s accomplishments in deliberative democracy, much of which inspired by the independence wars fought in India, Algeria, Cuba and elsewhere, authoritarian leaders pushing to return their corporate dues must seek different paths to persuade and fool.

Disinformation campaigns do follow rules of efficiency. Inevitably, at one point, they fail. The technocrats of risk calculate probabilistic charts to account for possible blowback, and how to anticipate the potential financial losses incurred.

For two years now, it has been clear to the eyes of any half-curious observer that the Iraqi occupation, through Abu Ghraib, destroyed cities like Fallujah, endless civilian deaths and brutal home searches, has pushed the bar of the terrorist coefficient in guerrilla warfare up to unheard of levels.

Never a word to condemn torture by shameless Blair. The same Blair who filed all Chechen resistance fighters as terrorists is now smearing England’s distinguished Muslim community as potential terrorists.

What if Jean Charles de Menezes was Muslim? No doubt, the British establishment would have barked at any complaint from the Islamic community, dismissing collateral damage as the outcome of acts “its own kind” had committed.

The slaying of the Brazilian Jean Charles finds some redemption in allowing British Muslims to assert their rights to voice opposition to British authoritarian and racist policies.

There was always another way to Blair’s in reacting to 9/11. Beyond France and Germany, this was Canada’s. Hospitable to any American in distress in those days of gloom, Canada opened its border inward. What it got in return was American disinterest and Bush’s oblivion, matched with unfounded accusations against Canada’s border enforcement.

There is another way, Mr Blair. It does not go by the path of State sanctioned execution, but by humility. That socialism was ever tied to your name is a historical stain on progressive politics.

Your European way of governance, acting with civility at home while leading imperialist policies abroad, is an old, hypocritical farce. It perpetuates the very lie upon which British civilization attempted to eradicate the French voice of Canada, and the voices of nations the world over.

There is another way. It’s called peace and dialogue. At least one country in the Commonwealth, Canada, has recognized that. Another nation in the Americas, Brazil, has also stood firm on international peace. Innocence has been killed to let the voice of protest breathe. And breathe it shall.

A Canadian, Norman Madarasz is visiting professor of philosophy (Bolsista CAPES/Brasil) at Universidade Gama Filho, Rio de Janeiro. He welcomes comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.

The body of the Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, who was mistakenly killed by London police who thought he was a terrorist, will reach his hometown of Gonzaga, in the state of Minas Gerais, today.

The funeral is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. The acting head of the secretariat of Human Rights, Mário Mamede Filho, will attend the funeral representing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The body will be flown from England to São Paulo at the expense of the British government. A Brazilian Air Force plane will then carry it to the city of Governador Valadares. The final 70 kilometers from Valadares to Gonzaga will be by car.

The Brazilian President talked yesterday by phone with the family of Jean Charles. Lula spoke to Jean’s father, Matosinhos Otoni da Silva and Jean’s brother, Giovani da Silva, according to information from the Presidency’s Press Secretariat.

Lula expressed his condolences and said that the Brazilian government had told the British government about the strange circumstances in which the killing of the Brazilian in London occurred.

He also stressed the importance that the family be promptly compensated for the tragic death and transmitted to Jean Charles’ family the British government’s apology request.

ABr

Jean Charles de Menezes, the 27-year-old Brazilian
slain by police last week in a London subway carriage, was shot eight times at
point blank range – seven times in the head and once in the neck.

This information was revealed at a coroners’ inquiry into de Menezes’ death, which opened and adjourned on Monday. The Financial Times reported one police source as stating de Menezes “was shot so many times he was beyond recognition.”

That the young electrician was the victim of an officially-sanctioned policy of state execution is beyond doubt. It is now known that two years ago, under the guise of the war against terror, police secretly adopted the shoot-to-kill policy carried out to such deadly effect in the capital last week.

Lord Stevens, who was the Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time, said the policy was in line with the practices of security forces in Israel and Sri Lanka.

Experience in these countries showed, Stevens said, “There is only one sure way to stop a suicide bomber determined to fulfill his mission: destroy his brain instantly, utterly.”

But de Menezes was not a suicide bomber, and police had no grounds to conclude that he was. When he left for work last Friday morning, the young man had no way of knowing plain clothes police were staking out the communal entrance to the block of flats where he lived.

Nor could he know that during his half-hour journey to the Stockwell subway station he was being covertly followed by an armed police unit, dressed in civilian garb, because his clothing had aroused their “suspicions.”

De Menezes would only have become aware his life was threatened when, as he entered the subway, a group of heavily armed males suddenly began shouting and chasing him.

Eyewitnesses to his shooting have said that the men did not identify themselves as police. Small wonder that the young worker looked like a “cornered rabbit” as he sought refuge in a train carriage.

As he was wrestled to the ground and pinned down by at least two men, whilst another placed a gun to his temple, one can only imagine his final terrified thoughts.

De Menezes’ padded jacket, considered “inappropriate” for this time of year, was apparently all it took for police to “destroy his brain instantly.”

All the more chilling is Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair’s warning that more innocent people could be gunned down. “Somebody else could be shot,” he said, “but everything is done to make it right.”

Prime Minister Tony Blair defended the shooting, insisting that the “police are doing their job in very, very difficult circumstances, and I think it is important that we give them every support.”

De Menezes’ cold-blooded slaying has shocked millions who rightly sense that it marks the beginning of a dark and disturbing chapter in British history – one in which armed death squads can operate with impunity across the UK.

Their concerns find no echo in the British media, however, which has rushed to defend the new “realities” of modern-day policing.

Writing in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, night editor David Dinsmore opined that whilst sympathy for de Menezes’ family was understandable, “I feel sorry for the cop who pulled trigger.”

Everyone makes “mistakes” in the course of their work, he continued, “but while most of us can walk away from our mistakes relatively unscathed, those [police officers] involved [in de Menezes’ shooting] can now expect to be charged, face losing their jobs and even going to jail.”

“It is exactly this kind of nonsense that cannot be allowed to happen,” Dinsmore continued. “Bin Laden must be rubbing his hands in glee as the liberal lawyers begin sharpening their pens ready to dash off the writs…

“Every politician in the country needs to have the conviction to get behind our policemen at this crucial time or we may as well surrender to the terrorists now.”

In truth, the officer involved in de Menezes’ death has not even been suspended pending further investigation, but simply moved to other duties, and an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission is expected to take months to report.

The IPCC has already stated that its investigation will not “start from the assumption” that any crime has been committed.

To date, most human rights organizations have remained silent. The civil rights organization Liberty, for example, has said it will not “rush to judgment” – a courtesy that was tragically not afforded to de Menezes.

What Dinsmore is really arguing is that at no time and on no account should the state be held to account for de Menezes’ death, nor any other action taken in the name of the “war against terror.” Those who demand otherwise are giving in to the terrorists.

Contempt for civil liberties is not confined to the right-wing press. Writing in the Guardian on July 25, Peter Preston insisted, “Stockwell is not the place for a soapbox.”

Making mistakes was not a crime, he wrote regarding the police shooting. “Simple, inevitable fallibility” was a “basic law of the human condition.”

“Stuff happens,” he declared, implying that the state execution of an innocent man is no big deal. “We’re crazy to rush on to soapboxes when it does,” he added.

According to Preston, there can be no discussion of de Menezes’ death and its implications. Instead, people must accept such horrors as a fact of life and move on.

An editorial in the Independent expressed the desire that the police officers involved in the shooting not be “scapegoated.”

Dismissing concerns that the young electrician’s death “showed that we now have a trigger-happy police force,” it argued, “All the evidence points in the opposite direction.”

Eight bullets pumped into the head of an innocent man is not evidence enough for the Independent.

Whilst all the newspapers agreed there should be no questioning of the police, no such restrictions apply to the victim. Independent columnist Bruce Anderson was perhaps the most insistent in this regard.

“Anyone who behaves as Mr. de Menezes did can not have been keeping abreast of current affairs,” Anderson wrote. “His conduct invited the police to draw the conclusions which they did and to act as they did. He was the author of his own misfortune.”

According to Anderson, de Menezes was asking for it. He should have realized that the war on terror had granted police a license to target anyone with brown skin dressed in a warm coat.

Just when one thought Anderson had plumbed the depths of political depravity, there was the Guardian.

In its leader of July 25, “Death of an Innocent Man,” the Guardian commented, “[T]he biggest mistake the police made was not the most obvious one of shooting the wrong man …

“The biggest mistake was not to properly prepare the public for the sustained campaign of violence facing the country. Even when Mr. Menezes was thought to be a bomber, witnesses were shocked by the ferocity with which he was killed. More should have been done to prepare the public for the forceful response needed to protect them.”

In other words, revulsion at de Menezes’ murder showed that the public had not been sufficiently “bloodied” beforehand to accept extra-judicial executions, and more efforts needed to be made towards this end.

Whatever the particulars surrounding de Menezes’ shooting, his death is being used retroactively precisely to condition public opinion to accept the militarization and brutalization of daily life.

No other conclusion can be drawn from the fact that the government and the security forces have surreptitiously remodeled law-and-order policies along the lines of Israel and Sri Lanka – two countries whose ruling elites have prosecuted a savage, decades-long civil war against Palestinians and Tamils respectively.

This points to another reality of Blair’s Britain: the huge social polarization that now exists. In recent decades, successive governments have carried out policies aimed at benefiting a tiny privileged elite at the expense of the broad mass of working people.

In Britain, private capital has been given the go-ahead to loot the vital resources – health, education, housing – on which millions depend.

Social benefits have been all but eradicated and wage rates slashed to amongst the lowest in Western Europe. Social inequality is now the greatest on record as a consequence.

This has been accompanied by a turn to imperialist war and neo-colonialism. From the Balkans, to Africa, to the Middle East, Britain’s ruling class seek once again to subjugate the former colonies, so as to more effectively exploit their peoples and resources.

The Guardian and the Independent speak for a narrow segment of the upper-middle-class that has materially benefited from these policies and is reconciled to their consequences.

Nothing progressive can be expected from such quarters. Opposition to the creeping imposition of a police state depends on the active and independent intervention of working people and all those committed to the defense of democratic rights, through the organization of protests, demonstrations and meetings to demand an end to state terror and the holding to account of all those responsible for preparing and commissioning the policy that led to de Menezes’ shooting.

Originally published by the World Socialist Web site – www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/mene-j27.shtml

The July 22 police execution of Brazilian-born electrician Jean Charles de Menezes on a London subway car has provoked shock and angry protest in the 27-year-old immigrant’s native land.

Some 1,500 working people and youth demonstrated Monday in Jean’s hometown of Gonzaga, a rural center in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais with a population of less than 6,000, most of them impoverished small farmers.

The protest came after the opening of a police inquest in London revealed that the Brazilian immigrant had been shot eight times at point-blank range – seven bullets to the head and one to the shoulder – as he lay pinned down by undercover cops on the floor of the subway car. Earlier reports based on witness accounts were that he had been shot five times.

Police first claimed that the savage killing was part of an “anti-terrorist operation” following failed attempts to detonate explosives in London’s transportation system a day earlier, an apparent bid to repeat the deadly transit bombings of July 7.

The authorities were subsequently forced to acknowledge that Jean had no connection whatsoever to the attacks, and that they had killed an innocent man.

In the aftermath of the shooting, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other officials have issued formal apologies and promises of financial compensation for the murdered worker’s family, while stressing that the British police’s “shoot to kill” policy would continue.

Blair’s plea for sympathy for the “difficult circumstances” faced by the police is virtually an assurance that this will not be the last such cold-blooded state murder.

Calling the killing an “assassination,” Gonzaga’s mayor, Julio de Souza, dismissed the British government’s expressions of regret.

“It’s easy for Blair to apologize, but it doesn’t mean very much,” he said. “What happened to English justice and England, a place where police patrol unarmed?”

Demonstrators carried the Brazilian flag as well as hand-printed placards denouncing the British police as “the real terrorists” and demanding that Jean’s body be returned immediately.

Other signs read, “Jean’s dream was ended by British brutality” and “The British shoot first and ask questions later.”

The British authorities have delayed the return of the Brazilian worker’s remains, claiming that they are a key piece of evidence in their inquiry into the shooting.

Family members said that London’s withholding of the body has only deepened their grief. Jean’s mother Maria Menezes said she does not know how many more days she will be forced to wait to bury her son.

“I am totally furious with the police,” she said. “How can they kill workers? Nothing will cure this pain.”

“Apologies are not enough, we want justice,” the demonstrators chanted Tuesday as they marched slowly through the cobblestone streets of Gonzaga. They paused for a prayer for the murdered man and to sing the national anthem.

The killing of a young worker abroad stuck a powerful chord in the small town, where virtually every family has a relative who has emigrated to the US or Europe to seek work, sending money home to alleviate the local poverty.

Throughout the country, the brutal public execution in London has touched a raw nerve.

Brazil has had its own bitter experience with police death squads, which acted against political dissidents under the dictatorship and continue to claim victims among the country’s poor.

Last year, according to Amnesty International, police shot to death 663 people in Brazil, a country of 180 million people.

Media reports suggesting that Jean had run from the police because he was working in Britain in violation of immigration law have been discounted by both the British and Brazilian governments.

Relatives in Brazil pointed out that he came home earlier this year for vacation and then returned to Britain in April, which would have been impossible if he lacked a necessary visa.

The false accusations that he was an illegal immigrant were widely seen as an attempt to somehow justify the shooting. It appears entirely possible that the young worker commuting to his job had no idea he was being chased by the police.

Witnesses have reported that his attackers never identified themselves before dragging him down and shooting him.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim met with his British counterpart Jack Straw and the two appeared together at a joint press conference Monday in an attempt to assuage the growing anger over the killing.

Straw declared that he “profoundly regretted” the killing and offered his condolences. Amorim had sought the British offer of compensation to the family.

Neither indicated how much would be offered to the family, and Straw indicated that the amount would be determined based on the investigation of the shooting.

Jean’s wages in London constituted a crucial support for his family in Brazil, allowing them to build a house recently.

Amorim stressed that the “terrorism must be fought with a total respect for human rights.”

Asked if he was satisfied with the British government’s response to the killing, he replied, “I think I will only be able to answer that fully when all of the stages mentioned have been completed, when the investigation has been concluded and those found guilty have been punished … when the questions related to the family have been settled.”

He added, “It is clear that if things happen in the way they apparently happened in this instance, it can only benefit terrorism.”

Both Jean’s relatives and the Brazilian people as a whole were far more critical of the Blair government’s response. Neither hypocritical apologies nor promises of cash compensation have been enough to dispel their anger.

“His apologies aren’t easing our pain,” said Arialva Pereira, one of Jean’s cousins, in response to Blair’s statement. “He’s not saying anything about punishing the police who did this, it’s more like he’s supporting them.”

Another cousin living in London indicated to the BBC that the family would pursue a legal case against the police and the Blair government.

“They have to pay for that in many ways, because if they do not, they are going to kill many people, they are going to kill thousands of people,” said Alex Pereira. “They killed my cousin, they could kill anyone.”

Unions and Brazil’s landless peasant movement called demonstrations outside the British embassy in Brasília and the consulate in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) issued a statement charging that Jean “was assassinated in cold blood, a victim of intolerance,” and calling for Britain’s withdrawal from Iraq.

Newspaper letter columns provided a reflection of the outrage sweeping the country and the popular association of the killing with the US and British war in Iraq.

Ademário Iris da Silva of Niterói wrote to the Rio daily O Globo that the blame for the killing of the Brazilian worker fell not only on the London police, but also “on Bush and, principally, on Tony Blair.

“Before launching a war, the leaders of the globalized world should face the fact that everything is globalized, including the terror that they impose on other peoples.”

A reader from Curitiba wrote the paper, “The murder of a Brazilian in London only proves that brutality and stupidity is on the rise the world over.

“If in London a person is assassinated on his back, one can imagine what the British soldiers are doing in Iraq. Or what they did in the epoch of colonialism. Who are the barbarians? Who really is a terrorist?”

And from Rio, a reader commented, “The murder of the Brazilian in London is a consequence of the policy of war. In militarizing the world, the US and its British allies have turned it into an unsafe place for everyone. But this doesn’t matter to Bush and Blair, who want not peace but power.”

Originally published by the World Socialist Web site –
www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/braz-j27.shtml