Original subtitles

As you're aware, there's a lot of police activity going on today

in relation to the Underground and bus incidents of yesterday.

This is a very, very fast-moving investigation.

I can say that as part of the operation,

Metropolitan Police officers have shot a man

inside Stockwell Underground Station.

It happened at approximately ten o'clock this morning.

I need to make clear that any death is deeply regrettable,

but as I understand the situation,

the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions.

By the time I'd got home,

I was aware that there was speculation

regarding the identity of the person that I killed.

I didn't get any sleep.

And I still had massive tinnitus. Very, very loud ringing in my ears.

Next day, I caught the tube back to work.

I was called into the chief superintendent's office.

He told me that the man I'd shot was completely innocent.

I can't describe how I felt. It was the worst feeling ever.

I killed an innocent man, and I now know who that man is.

I woke up very early morning.

Everything was so silent at the house.

I knocked on Jean's bedroom door.

No answer, so I slowly opened the door.

The bed was exactly how it was before.

It was made. Everything was neat and tidy.

I said, "Well, Jean probably didn't come home last night."

I heard the doorbell.

There were these two guys.

They started telling me the police would like to find out

if there were any relatives of Jean Charles,

that Jean Charles was, um, suspected

of being involved with terrorism.

I was really surprised.

Jean is just a hardworking guy from Brazil.

We just said, "Okay, we need to go to the police station and try to solve it,

because I'm sure that this is a misunderstanding."

I had a phone call from my boss,

and he told me that there'd been a shooting at Stockwell tube station.

I was a detective constable at the time,

and we dealt with deaths in custody, police shootings,

anything really where someone had died having had an interaction with the police.

You're there to explain what's happened,

why it's happened, if you can,

and help that family get through that bereavement.

I'm told it's a suicide bomber,

and then I'm being told it was an innocent person

that had been killed,

and I was gonna have to tell his family

that armed officers had shot him and killed him.

When the family arrived,

they were clearly concerned about why they were there.

I asked them if they knew where their cousin, Mr. de Menezes, was.

They said they didn't. He wasn't answering the phone.

I remember that the police were talking a lot.

Talking, talking, talking.

But I didn't understand anything.

I only understood the last sentence.

He's dead.

That's all I understood.

You can't pretty up a message of your loved one's been killed.

They were killed by an armed officer who shot them in the back of the head.

They showed this picture that they found in his pocket,

and said that probably that could be the guy that they killed,

and that we need to go to the morgue to see if that's him.

I thought, "This can't be true. It's not possible."

I remember having this hope, "It might not be him. Might not be him."

We were led to a room

that had a partition with a green curtain.

Forest green.

Getting behind that curtain,

somehow, I'd seen the head, the face first.

It took me one second.

It was confirmed that was him.

I just came out, and I can't remember the rest.

Vivian collapsed, um, to the floor.

I couldn't-- I can't explain the feeling.

I remember

realizing, in a sobering moment,

the reality of what had happened.

Tonight, Scotland Yard identified him as Jean Charles de Menezes,

a 27-year-old Brazilian.

He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was going about his lawful business.

It was an incredibly tragic event.

There were criticisms. I understand that.

Shot, but innocent.

You don't need to pump seven bullets into the back of a man's head.

The operation was hailed a ruthless but necessary success.

Now it's clear it was a terrible mistake.

It was devastating.

Um...

That such an error had led to someone's...

someone's death.

Police admission that the man shot dead

was not involved in Thursday's attempted bombings

will deal a serious blow to the police investigation.

It will also raise serious questions about the manner of the shooting.

They are likely to come under intense scrutiny in the coming days.

That's just a nightmare for the police.

All eyes are on you, and there was a lot more pressure on us.

But, at the same time,

we knew that we had at least four suicide bombers on the loose.

We had to get these people arrested and get them off the streets.

It's a security operation, the scale of which

hasn't been seen since World War II.

More than 6,000 officers drafted in from across the country.

It's quite clear that it's going to be a really intensive manhunt

to try to identify the four individuals.

The day after the attack, we still had very few leads.

The only name and address that we had was Hussain Osman,

obtained from the gym membership card,

who, tragically, Jean Charles was mistaken for.

We do not know the names of any of the other suspects.

The only thing we had were these CCTV images.

We established fairly quickly

that Hussain Osman decamped from a train at Shepherd's Bush,

onto the lines, down a five-meter wall, through someone's garden.

The man clambered through this window and made his way through the house,

where Mrs. Henry up there caught a fleeting glimpse of him.

And he said, "I won't hurt you."

"I'll just run through your door," and he went out there.

He discarded his upper clothing,

and we lost track of Hussain Osman.

We eventually lost track of all four suspects.

Because of the absolute imperative to detain the four individuals

before they could involve themselves in any further terrorist activity,

a decision was made that we would publish their images in the press.

The risk is that you're alerting the suspects themselves.

That could force their hand to doing something that is unexpected.

As far as I was concerned, the risk to the public was such

that there was no sensible option

other than to put those pictures out into the public domain.

Sifting through hundreds of hours of CCTV footage,

police were able to come up with four remarkably clear images.

Do you recognize any of these men?

Did you see them at the three underground stations or on the bus?

Did you see them at a different location?

Everybody on every news outlet, every conversation, it felt,

in the United Kingdom, was about these attacks.

It's time for the public to do what they're very good at,

which is support investigations.

As well as seeking public support

and asking for the public to be your eyes and ears,

we were monitoring a number of communication devices,

and there was one that we strongly suspected

Hussain Osman was using.

We were trying desperately to locate where he was.

We discovered that he had gone to Waterloo International Station

and boarded a Eurostar train to Paris using a false passport.

And as soon as it left Britain, the phone went dead.

Hussain Osman had slipped through the net.

Obviously, like everybody else, I wanted the people

that had attempted these bombings to be caught.

But in times of crisis,

that's when you need faith in the public institutions even more.

That's when you need to know the police are gonna be acting

in a way that is proportionate.

It's not fair. This person was innocent.

The day after the shooting,

there was a vigil outside Stockwell Station.

The reason that so many of us went there

was to ensure that this family feels supported,

and we make sure we find out what's going on

with the police so that this kind of stuff doesn't happen again.

There's a lot of anger here today at Stockwell Station.

Very many questions that remain unanswered.

And I guess that is where my involvement with the family started.

It was pretty exhausting, you know?

Luckily, we had a lot of support from people,

who came our way through Yasmin.

Without them, we wouldn't have done anything.

How would we, mere immigrants, fight against the system?

The more we found out,

it was clearly a series of systematic failures by the police.

We had everything from a really chaotic control room,

where it felt like no one really knew what the strategy was that day.

Was it shoot to kill? Was it not? Down to kind of quite minutiae.

The photograph that was given to surveillance officers

being really bad quality.

There was a failure to apprehend a potential, you know, suicide bomber.

I mean, if they thought he was a threat,

letting him get on a bus and then a tube felt like quite a big error.

And let's not forget the fact

that Jean Charles was mistaken for Hussain Osman

says a lot about how people of color

are kind of bound together in this-- in the UK.

They looked completely different.

What is that, other than prejudice?

Every person of color at that time was thinking,

"That could've been me, or my brother, or my son."

Actually, it was quite frightening.

There will be fears of a backlash,

although with the biggest manhunt in British history still underway,

few will want to be seen to be openly criticizing the police.

At that early stage, we had very few leads.

And then Saturday, in the early hours,

there was a call from a member of the public

who said he believed that the image of the man on the bus...

was his son.

We now believe the man on the bus to be Muktar Said Ibrahim,

also known as Muktar Mohammed Said.

It must have been a very difficult decision for a father to make.

But nonetheless, he did what he felt was the right thing to do.

His family, I don't think they had a clue that he was involved in extremism.

They were shocked to see his image.

They gave us an address in Hackney, which was subject to surveillance,

but he had left that address.

The man living next door recognized him at once.

- Shit. I can't believe it. - I can't believe that, you know.

I never really spoke to him, but he looked...

When I used to see him, he looked a bit dodgy-like.

When 21/7 happened,

I wanted to find out more about the men behind it.

I did a lot of research in trying to identify

what kind of young man Muktar Said was,

and why he travelled on that path.

He came to the UK to escape civil war in Eritrea,

and I discovered he was really troubled and got caught up in a gang.

In prison, like many young men looking for meaning,

they turn to religion.

The difference was that he became radicalized.

When he came out of prison,

he started mixing with exactly the same people

who had been radicalized like him.

Were the other bombers similar to Muktar Said Ibrahim?

How did they meet? What was motivating them?

They might be related to the 7/7 attacks.

They may have been a second cell.

Maybe there's a third cell, a fourth cell.

With four bombers on the loose, we needed a breakthrough,

and in response to the publication of the pictures, we received a call

from an individual who looked after a block of flats in North London.

He was able to identify one of the suspects

being the resident of Curtis House.

He named the man Yassin Omar,

the suspect for the Warren Street bombing.

We very much wanted to gain entry there as quickly as we can.

Going into Curtis House, we weren't really sure what to expect.

We knew that there could be suicide bombers in there.

They could go bang at any moment in time.

We walk up the stairs. We have to be quiet.

What we don't wanna do is alert the people in there.

That's where the adrenaline starts to get raised a little bit.

Clear. Advance. Clear!

We went in. It's clearly been lived in.

You're searching around the flat.

But there's no people.

I went in the kitchen.

We go in a lot of properties where the cooker's not pristine,

but this one was different.

It had corrosive splodges everywhere.

I remember looking under the bed.

There was a box of bottles of peroxide under there.

Hang on a minute. Peroxide was an element used in the 7/7 bombs.

So this was a bomb factory.

Also found within the flat were some extremist material

connecting them to Finsbury Park Mosque.

When 21/7 happened, my first instinct was to say,

there's a link here to Finsbury Park Mosque.

This is the work of Abu Hamza.

...by fighting, and when you fight, you kill.

Abu Hamza was a radical preacher

spreading extremist ideologies through Finsbury Park Mosque.

I've been watching that place for years,

and this wasn't about ordinary British Muslims.

This was a place where Abu Hamza

had taken over a peaceful mosque in London.

If it's killing, do it! If it's paying, pay.

If it's anything poison, poison! You help your brothers any way you like!

In the late 1990s,

we managed to go in with a secret camera.

And I got in there, and I'm thinking, "This is bonkers."

It's got nothing to do with Islam.

Illegal passports changing hands, but also credit card fraud.

Criminal activity going on.

But what really shocked me,

there were young boys in the room watching videos about jihad.

And I'm like, "Was that somebody having their head chopped off, or something?"

Abu Hamza was using Finsbury Park Mosque as a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda.

His primary aim was to get inside the heads of vulnerable young men,

and to unleash them on the world to do bad things.

But they don't form an army, they form a cell.

There's no general saying, "You will do it like this."

The general is saying, "I'll give you the ideology."

"I'll give you the reason for doing it,

but you've got to go off and work out what you're gonna do."

Eventually, Abu Hamza was arrested,

and Finsbury Park stopped becoming the menace.

The menace went underground.

But by that time, it was too little, too late.

There were cells out there, all over the place,

ready to do their dirty work.

At the bomb factory at Curtis House,

a significant amount of evidential material was found.

They purchased over 400 liters of hydrogen peroxide,

much more than was needed for the four devices

that had been found at the scenes.

We hadn't got any idea where Yassin Omar was,

but there were two newspapers found at Curtis House.

One was a Sun newspaper from the 22nd of July.

That meant that somebody had been back into that flat since the attacks,

so our concern was that the recent activity at that address

meant that there could be more devices being prepared.

This is not the B team. These weren't the amateurs.

Therefore, it is absolutely imperative that we find those responsible.

A breakthrough in the case remains as elusive as ever.

Five days into this manhunt, and the bombers are still at large.

26th of July, one of my colleagues came rushing down the corridor towards me

to tell me there's somebody on the phone

that says that Yassin Omar was residing at one of his premises

up in Birmingham, having arrived there fairly recently.

When we reviewed CCTV material,

it showed that he'd been traveling in a burka.

In fact, he had left London on the evening of the 22nd of July,

with assistance of his partner,

and then he was collected from the station and taken to the flat in Birmingham.

West Midlands Police immediately launched an operation on the flat.

When the armed police entered the house where he was staying...

Police! Don't move!

...he had donned a backpack and was standing in the bath.

Armed police!

Armed police! Get down!

Get down now!

The policy at the time was to shoot to kill.

Anything else could mean he could detonate his device.

Down on the floor! Down!

And so faced with that situation, one of the officers drew his Taser.

Armed police! Put your hands up!

The risk is that somebody's actually wearing an explosive device.

A Taser may inadvertently detonate the device.

Armed police! Don't move! Get on the ground! Show your hands!

Get down!

But it worked.

The backpack was empty, thank God.

No one was killed.

But we had finally got one of them in custody,

but we were all amazed that they'd taken that risk in order not to shoot someone.

I'm sure the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

played on the minds of the firearms officers up in Birmingham.

I'd like to move to the tragic incident at Stockwell.

Thank you, Chairman.

I think that's the right word for it, Chairman. It is a tragedy.

The Metropolitan Police Service takes full responsibility

for the death of Mr. Menezes,

but the key point is the responsibility for this actually lies

with individuals who use suicide as a weapon of terror

on the streets and below the streets of London.

This is a dreadful consequence.

I think the police underestimated the Menezes family,

and they underestimated how deeply

the case would connect with millions of people up and down the country.

Murderers! Murderers!

Don't shoot to kill!

Let's be very clear.

You know, it was a very frightening, chaotic time,

but it really frustrates me when I hear officers trying to come up

with a bunch of reasons that would excuse their behavior.

Ian Blair's original press conference that first Friday...

And the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions.

Even if he had been briefed incorrectly,

that statement was simply not true.

Right from the start, the police put out a press release

saying that Jean Charles was wearing suspicious clothing,

his behavior was untoward,

and that he was issued with a warning and refused to obey.

Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.

The police have said they ordered him to stop.

It's then believed he jumped the ticket barrier

and ran down to platform level.

There was a lot of inaccurate reporting,

and there was an awful lot of confusion.

It was widely reported that we had chased the subject down into the tube.

Eyewitnesses say they rushed inside,

following a man who jumped over the ticket barrier.

That was not the case at all.

I leapt over the barriers.

Charlie 12 leapt over the barriers.

Not the suspect.

He'd walked through, gone down the steps,

and got into the tube long before we deployed.

And I think that's where the confusion lies.

It was us the public had seen, not the suspect.

But police failed to come out and correct this in the press,

and when the police or the state lie, or cover up, or spread misinformation,

the legacy of that can be seen.

To this day, we still get people who'll be like,

"But he jumped the barrier, didn't he?"

Or, "Wasn't he wearing a bulky jacket?" It just stuck.

It felt like they were trying to vilify him.

Did you feel responsible?

I am responsible, and I accept responsibility.

As a firearms officer, ultimately, the decision to use force is yours.

But why were we in that position?

Those people in command that put him in that position,

they also have to answer.

When you go back to that time,

everyone was on tenterhooks.

Everyone felt there was going to be further terrorist attacks.

Obviously, in the weeks immediately following the 7th of July,

that was the high point of anxiety.

It was pretty much constant.

But this was our life at the moment. We were living this every single day.

Pressure was particularly on the police, and on us as well,

to find out, is there...

a positive link with 7/7 and 21/7 or not?

We got the materials

from each of the 21/7 scenes into the lab.

In 7/7, the ingredients were black pepper and hydrogen peroxide.

In this case, the main ingredients were hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour.

We tested them

and found the reason that the 21/7 devices didn't explode

was that they'd made their mixtures

with not quite strong enough hydrogen peroxide.

If they'd got their mixture right, there would've been another 7/7.

So it seemed like, at a higher level somewhere,

the instructions on how to construct devices

had come from the same source,

but they'd gone away and done their own variations.

When we did the intelligence checks into Muktar Ibrahim, the bus bomber,

we found out that he'd travelled out to Pakistan.

Significantly, at the same time that Muktar Ibrahim was in Pakistan,

Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer

from the 7/7 attacks were also in Pakistan.

We don't know whether they met,

but there's going to be some connection, right?

What do you think they're doing in Pakistan?

Playing on computer games?

Smoking weed or whatever?

No, they were learning how to build bombs, how to blow people up.

It eventually became clear that both bombing teams were coordinated

by the same al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan to attack Britain.

The 21/7 guys weren't copycat bombers.

This is an al-Qaeda network.

We didn't know how wide the network was, so there were lots and lots of concerns.

We are aware of the identities of three of the bombers.

We don't have any indication yet of who the bomber from the Oval was.

The important thing with this whole series of events,

is it's easy to tie it up in telephone interception

and cell site analysis and everything else that was going on in the background,

but actually, the thing that solved this was the public.

Someone identified the Oval bomber as Ramzi Mohammed.

Once that information became known, we immediately were able to make links

to addresses, one of which was Dalgarno Gardens.

We were briefed that we were gonna be doing a raid on an address in London.

The thoughts in the back of your mind has got to be,

"Have they got explosives still in that flat?"

So that's a massive worry.

Because these people have tried to blow up buses and trains,

the major concern was for the public living in the flats next to them.

You've got to try and evacuate them as quickly as possible

without causing a panic, so we said there was a gas leak.

You must do what we say!

The next part of the operation was to contact the suspect inside.

We were just shouting, "Armed police, come out of the address."

No one replied to our communications. We had nothing back.

Suddenly, one of the riflemen came over the radio and said,

"I have just seen an Arabic-looking man looking out the window of the flat."

It was decided that the best way to breach the front door

was with an explosive entry.

Keep going, please. Keep moving back.

Keep moving this way.

Move back, please.

The whole time this is taking place, we are shouting, "Come out, come out."

Mohammed, are you inside? Is anyone in the flat?

And then suddenly, children appeared from another flat.

The guy was actually asleep, and that's why it took him some time

to cotton on to what was taking place in his block.

Oh God.

My son is in there.

It's not exactly clear what it is, but we've now heard

four shots coming from the direction of the flats over there.

The police are moving everybody out in a hurry. They don't want people here.

They're worried about people being in line of sight of whatever is happening.

We fired from shotguns, CS gas rounds into the front of the flat.

So we filled the flat with gas.

Could feel it burning my skin as it was coming out of the flat.

And then, at this point, the suspect started communicating with us.

You will be safe if you do what you're told!

He was to come out only in his underwear,

because we didn't want him to have a device strapped to his body.

When the guy walked out of the flat, one of the guys went,

"It's the bus bomber," quite loudly over the radio.

Muktar Said Ibrahim's presence within that same flat was unknown to us.

It was a great relief and a huge added bonus,

that instead of being able to detain just one further of the suspects,

two were detained.

They just looked like two normal lads,

who'd got it all wrong and were in a world of shit.

Three down, one to go.

Hussain Osman had got out of the country using someone else's passport.

We knew that he had relatives in Italy,

so there was a fair chance that was where he was heading.

Fortuitously for us,

he inserted an Italian SIM card into his phone.

The Italian police very quickly mounted an operation.

Police came and went into the apartment and took Hussain Osman.

He had a hood, and they put him in a car, and they took him away.

First and foremost, there was an enormous sigh of relief.

From a standing start of having four grainy images of CCTV,

we were able to identify, locate, and safely detain

all the principal suspects, literally at the end of eight days.

Four alleged bombers arrived at Belmarsh Magistrates' Court.

Security couldn't have been tighter.

Both armed police and a helicopter tracked the men

as they were taken to court from Paddington Green.

We were flying back home for the funeral,

and I was in the same plane as Jean's body,

and everything I could remember is, like, how life is so unpredictable.

Like, three months ago, I was in the plane, coming here,

like, Jean was telling me jokes, we were, like, laughing.

Jean took me to England, now I'm bringing him back.

The most difficult part

was facing my uncle and aunt.

Seeing the face of a mother that had just lost a child,

in that situation,

it tore my heart apart.

Because no mother deserves to bury her child.

I would say to Jean Charles's family that I am sorry,

that I, and another officer, that we were put in a position

where we killed your son.

I would do anything to roll back time,

to have a different set of circumstances where...

that didn't happen.

That shouldn't have happened.

Jean Charles's killing was a symbol, really,

of, I think, a greater fear that so many people were experiencing

in the UK at that time.

We'd had the 7th of July.

We'd had the 21st of July.

Was this the new normal? We just didn't know.

I go into this hypnotic state sometimes.

The sounds, smells trigger things.

It's like scar tissue, really.

You know, 14 people died on the bus that day,

and a lot of them were sat really close to me, almost knee-to-knee.

How come I survived?

My life, for a long period of time, was like somebody had smashed a mirror,

and no two bits fitted, no two bits went together.

It didn't matter if I could glue the thing together,

it was never gonna be the same again.

And it took me a really, really long time to realize that

I deserve to be happy, and I deserve to have a life.

Being angry, being upset about it, choosing not to forgive them,

doesn't change what's happened.

It doesn't bring my mom back.

But I think she would say to me,

"Life is hard, but, yeah, life would go on, and you'll be okay."

We're not gonna let them win.

That was the sentiment across London from everyone.

Muslim or otherwise, we're not gonna let them win.