Tom Griffin (London, OK): Yesterday's proceedings at the De Menezes inquest provide an important illustration of why the Counter Terrorism Bill deserves continued scrutiny even after the defeat of 42 days in the Lords.
Justice4Jean reports:
An officer, known only as 'Owen' due to being successfully granted anonymity for the inquest, admitted to deleting a section of notes which would have been potentially vital evidence to any investigative proceedings.
'Owen', who was Deputy Surveillance Co-ordinator for the operation and was present in the operation control room working alongside senior officers including DAC Cressida Dick and D Supt Jon Boucher, wrote up detailed notes of his recollections shortly after Jean's death. These included details of conversations, decisions and commands given by senior officers during the final half hour of Jean's life before his fatal shooting.
The family today learnt that three lines of these original notes were deleted before submission and were not included in his statement or evidence given at the Health & Safety trial. The deleted section detailed disagreement between senior officers about whether to let Jean travel on tube or stop him as he entered Stockwell tube station. 'Owen's' original notes recalled Cressida Dick saying 'Let him run' but then being dissuaded by another senior officer that he should be stopped. This information contradicts the accounts given by senior officers and would clearly have been seen as damaging to the Metropolitan police.
There will now be an investigation by the IPCC, with a key issue clearly being whether 'Owen' was encouraged to redact his evidence by his superiors.
As Marcel Berlins noted in in a prescient warning in Monday's Guardian, the scope for such revelations could be sharply curtailed under provisions of the Counter Terrorism Bill to be debated on Thursday:
The main objection is to clause 77, which would give a home secretary the power to order that an inquest be held without a jury if he or she believes that evidence given should not be made public "a) in the interests of national security, b) in the interests of the relationship between the UK and another country, or c) otherwise in the public interest". For instance, a home secretary could decide that an inquest into the death of a British soldier killed by friendly fire be held without a jury, because the evidence disclosed might make the US cross with the UK; or that it was against the public interest for us to know about the police's behaviour when they killed Jean Charles de Menezes. There are circumstances in which sensitive information ought not to be made public; but the government's plan is overkill, gives the home secretary too much power and greatly reduces the public's right to know the truth about suspicious and controversial deaths.
