British special branch officers launched a "blatant" cover-up to try to conceal their fatal role in the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, it was claimed today.
Undercover police tried to change a surveillance log to hide the fact they had mistakenly identified the 27-year-old electrician as a suspected suicide bomber.
Mr de Menezes was repeatedly shot in the head as he tried to jump on to a train at Stockwell Tube station in south London in the aftermath of the abortive July 21st attacks.
The alleged cover-up - reported in the News of the World - meant blame for the tragedy would have been shifted to senior Scotland Yard commanders or the armed police who pulled the trigger.
Last night a spokesman for the de Menezes family launched a scathing attack on the British authorities for keeping them "in the dark" - and said the latest revelations added to their beliefs the shooting had been shrouded by "lies and deception".
The claimed leak of the IPCC report - handed over to the Crown Prosecution Service 10 days ago - revealed de Menezes was only shot after he was wrongly identified as suspected suicide bomber Hussein Osman by an undercover Special Branch team.
However, once they realised their fatal error, officers altered the log to show that no positive identification had been made. The News of the World quoted a "Whitehall source" as saying: "It says the log was actually tampered with in a major way.
"In particular the words AND and NOT were inserted about the Osman ID, so it read `and it was not Osman' rather than `it was Osman'." The log was apparently tampered with at a debriefing meeting 10 hours after the shooting. It had been produced by colleagues of the officers listening to the team's radio messages. During the evening debriefing, the officers on the ground were allowed to check it for errors - but crucially, the alterations were not signed. "It was blatant, it was clumsy."
The paper reported the source added: "By doing that forgery they potentially made their colleagues back at the control room at central command at the Yard, and particularly their firearm officer colleagues, liable to be out in the dock for murder."
Earlier this month copies of the report were sent to the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, the Crown Prosecution Service - but not the family. It was revealed earlier this month that as many as 10 police officers could potentially face criminal charges over the fatal shooting.
The de Menezes family has demanded that the CPS reach a decision no later than February 16th.
In reality, it is likely to take several weeks, if not months, longer than that. The family is angry at not being given at least a briefing on the contents of the IPCC's report. It will now be up to the CPS to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to actually bring charges against any of those officers - a much higher threshold.
The IPCC has refused to say exactly how many officers were interviewed under caution and they have not been identified.
The full text of the report, destined for the Crown Prosecution Service, will never be published in full due to highly sensitive intelligence on the July 7th bombings. However, the IPCC spokesman said there was a possibility that parts of the report could be released if the CPS decided there was insufficient evidence to launch a criminal prosecution. "That is something we are considering," the spokesman added.
PA