A few weeks since the shooting of Menezes, after the lies coming from the Scotland Yard and London Police have quietened down a bit, some of the truth has come out of the event. It has been revealed that some of the things fed to the hungry media by the police were either misinformed or worse, an outright lie to cover-up the brutal death of an innocent man at the hands of the British security forces.
First, Menezes himself was not aware of the blanket surveillance that has been carried out by the British police and Scotland Yard of the block of apartments that he had been living in. Far from trying to run away from the police, he had no knowledge at all about what had been happening around him. That fateful morning, Menezes simply got out of his apartment and walked to catch a bus to go to work. At this point, as he was boarding a bus, an authorisation had been issued to use force on him without any attempt to verify his identity.
At the end of his journey, he alighted from the bus and walked towards the tube station. Far from the claims of the police that he was running away, he simply walked down the steps, through the turnstyles and after picking up a free newspaper he walked on the escalator down to the platforms. It was when he boarded that train that armed police stormed into the carriage and shot him about eight times, all while his arms were held behind his back, all at point-blank range. He was shot a few times in the head and the rest in the torso.
All the claims about Menezes wearing a heavy coat in a summer’s day is also an outright lie. From the photos from the scene of the shooting (showing his body on the floor of the train) he was not wearing anything heavy, only a light denim jacket. This was also verified by footage taken from the station’s surveillance cameras.
It is clear that fearing a backlash from the public for police brutality, a story was quickly hatched by the media unit of the police and Scotland Yard to be fed to the media for public consumption. This kind of event, while it has not happened in London or Sydney for a while, will be more and more common as the “shoot to kill” authorisation will be used more and more in the so-called “war on terrorism”. Remember, everybody is now guilty, until they are proven innocent, if they get the chance.