A series of apparent blunders led to him being shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder by police. Sir Ian BlairBritain's top police officer, educated at Oxford. It remains to be seen if the career of Sir Ian Blair will be, too.. Jean Charles de Menezes The victim, aged 27, who was from Gonzaga in Minas Gerais state, Brazil, and was working in London as an electrician. Amid calls for his resignation, he was forced to give hasty interviews in which he apologised for the incident, but pointed out that 56 people had died in the London bombings and that, in effect, Mr de Menezes was a casualty of war. Sir Ian Blair may have wished that the row remained far away It did not.
In the first eight months of 2003, police allegedly shot dead 800 civilians in Rio de Janeiro alone.But last week, the London shooting dominated Brazil's attention in a way that killings at home seldom do. In June, a Unesco study revealed that 550,000 Brazilians have been killed in firearms incidents since 1979, and that in 2003, one in three deaths of Brazilians aged 15-24 were attributable to guns. It has sent two senior legal investigators - a federal deputy attorney general and federal prosecutor - to London to meet the IPCC and senior Met officers.The outrage in Brazil has prompted a few off-the-record remarks from British politicians, given the level of gun violence over there. But last week's revelations put the Sao Paolo coalition government under intense pressure. The family's lawyers allege that government officials urged the family not to pursue a claim for compensation and successfully persuaded Mr de Menezes's parents, Maria Otoni de Menezes and Matozinho Otoni da Silva, not to order a second post mortem. In the aftermath of the shooting, Brazil's left-of-centre coalition, dominated by the Workers Party, played down the tragedy. The family's spokesman is Asad Rehman, an experienced anti-racist activist who joined George Galloway's campaign team after leaving Amnesty International.The row over Mr de Menezes' death is threatening to cause diplomatic damage to Britain's relations with Brazil.
The commission is run by two prominent human rights activists - its chairman, Nick Hardwick, the former chief executive of the Refugee Council, and deputy chair, John Wadham, former head of the civil rights group Liberty.And the family, to the private irritation of the police, is being represented by Gareth Peirce, the most experienced and successful civil rights lawyer of her generation who is notorious in police circles for acting for IRA bombers and alleged Islamist militants. This will heighten an intensifying political battle between the IPCC, the victim's family and the Met, a battle which pits old foes against each other. At this stage the operation moved to code red tactic, responsibility was handed over to CO19 [the Met's specialist firearms unit]."Sir Ian Blair is also expected to be interviewed by the IPCC - believed to be the first time a Met commissioner has been formally questioned for alleged policy failures. But nor, it now seems, did she give specific instructions to "shoot to kill".The IPCC dossier states that once Mr de Menezes was wrongly identified as a suspect, "Gold Command made the decision and gave appropriate instructions that de Menezes was to be prevented from entering the Tube system. Claims last week that Commander Dick had specifically ordered the police not to shoot are denied by sources at Scotland Yard. I then pushed him back on to the seat where he had previously been sitting with the right-hand side of my head pressed against the right-hand side of his torso.
