Report: Slain Brazilian Not Fleeing in Britain

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

And I'm Michele Norris.

In Britain, a news report is raising new questions about the police shooting of a 27-year-old Brazilian man. Jean Charles de Menezes was killed on a subway train shortly after a set of bombings and attempted bombings hit London. ITV News has obtained closed-circuit television images and documents that contradict police accounts of the incident.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

Joining us from London is Craig Oliver, who is the head of output for ITV News there.

And, Mr. Oliver, I'd like you to tell us about what you see--what the ITV reporters saw in that closed-circuit television footage that contradicted the police report.

Mr. CRAIG OLIVER (ITV News): Well, there's a number of things here. What we basically got was a series of photographs and a series of documents which are in the investigation into what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes. Basically what the photographs showed was Mr. de Menezes who had had his--basically his brains blown out by the police officers on the train. A story that had gone around at the beginning was that he was wearing a heavily padded jacket and that may have shown--revealed that he was wearing basically a suicide bomb underneath it. In fact, the pictures reveal very clearly that he was wearing a light denim jacket.

At the time when the story first came out as well, there'd been a number of reports that he'd vaulted the barriers at the Tube station. This has proven to be totally incorrect. In fact, he used a ticket to go through the barriers, walked down and when he entered to the bottom of the stairs--or got to the bottom of the escalator he saw a train was in the station. And he did what normal Londoners would do at that point and run for the train because they tend to go very quickly.

SIEGEL: And all of this is documented?

Mr. OLIVER: All of this is documented. The pictures are actually of the--after he had been shot by police. The documents basically are a series of eyewitness reports that went on at the time. There's also briefing documents that the police have put together after the event and also a number of reports from the surveillance team that followed Mr. de Menezes and also from the officers that were involved in the shooting of him.

SIEGEL: How do you reconcile what has been turned up about this shooting now with the first-day reports, which had witnesses saying he leapt the turnstile, was wearing a heavily padded coat?

Mr. OLIVER: It's a very difficult one. I think that Ian Blair--Sir Ian Blair, who is the head of the Metropolitan Police in London, at the time said as he understood it that Mr. de Menezes had been behaving suspiciously. Now a lot of attention in the last day or two has focused on him is why did he propagate that story when clearly all the eyewitnesses and all the police testimony that has come out since has proven that he didn't behave suspiciously? So there's a lot of questions about that.

What I want to take you back to, Robert, is at the time what happened was that they were following this man from a flat, which is in 21 Scotia Road in southwest London. What they discovered on the day after the bomb was a gymnasium card, and that led them back to 21 Scotia Road. They had a surveillance team who were outside the flat and they were basically monitoring people coming and going because they believed that the suicide bombers or would-be suicide bombers were living in there. Now what happened was one of the surveillance officers was filming what was going on all the time or occasionally and if somebody came out he'd film them, then he'd cross-reference them with pictures of the would-be suicide bombers.

Now what happened was--there's no other way of putting it--he was basically relieving himself at the time when Mr. de Menezes came out. So he said, `I think it could be them, but I'm not sure.' So at that point, all the other surveillance officers who followed him for the rest of the journey to the Tube station thought that they were dealing with a would-be suicide bomber.

SIEGEL: And...

Mr. OLIVER: In fact, they were dealing with an innocent man because the man who was relieving himself hadn't really got his line of sight correct.

SIEGEL: One last question and I'll let you go. From what investigators now have found about this shooting, do they still believe that the police were--however wrongly or recklessly they might have been acting--were acting sincerely and did, indeed, think they were preventing someone from pulling off a suicide bombing?

Mr. OLIVER: Well, I think that that is the million-dollar question. I don't think that anybody doubts that Sir Ian Blair or his police officers' primary motive is to protect the people of London and the people of the United Kingdom and all the tourists that come here. I think the big question is: Did they allow a situation where myths were allowed to grow which painted them in a good light and painted Mr. de Menezes in a bad light? I think that that is the thing that will be--come out from the investigation at the end. At the moment, the jury is out.

SIEGEL: Mr. Oliver, thanks a lot for talking with us today.

Mr. OLIVER: Thank you.

SIEGEL: That's Craig Oliver, is the head of output for Britain's ITV News, the network that reported on the investigation into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, who is the Brazilian man shot by British police the day after the botched London bombings.

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