On the strip of brick wall between the Costcutter shop and Stockwell Tube station there is a colourful memorial to the short life and violent death of Jean Charles de Menezes.
This is a gritty corner of south London but the mosaic is respected; unmarred by graffiti, flyposters or political stickers. Its centrepiece is a picture of the young Brazilian, his face caught by sunlight as he turns and smiles at the camera. The words “rest in peace” are picked out in blue tiles and “nos te amomos” (we love you) in red. Beneath his picture in white capitals is the word INNOCENT.
Jean Charles, 27, a wholly innocent man, was on his way to work as an electrician when he was shot dead by police in a train carriage beneath these streets in the febrile, frightening summer of 2005, when London was hit by suicide bomb attacks.
His killing reverberated around the world. On July 22, 2005, two Metropolitan Police firearms officers, believing they were chasing a terrorist, ran onto a Northern Line train where another officer pinned Jean Charles to his seat as they shot him in the head.
Seven times.
Using hollow-point bullets designed to expand inside the target’s body rather than pass through — ammunition that had been issued to firearms teams who might need to incapacitate a suicide bomber.
At their smallholding 5,500 miles away in the countryside near the town of Gonzaga, Jean Charles’s parents had been following the news since the 7/7 suicide bombings a fortnight before, anxious about their youngest son.
“My husband had been watching TV and he saw that a terrorist had been killed in London,” recalls Maria de Menezes. “He said to me, ‘Come and have a look at this,’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to see it.’
• 7/7: The London Bombings — a potent reminder of a terrifying time for London
“He was saying, ‘No, you must come and see this,’ and then I went and watched and the first words that came out of my mouth were, ‘What about this person’s mum?’ I don’t like to see anything violent. I don’t like violence. That was my reaction, to wonder about this boy’s mum.”
Hours later, the couple were visited by their family doctor, who often called from house to house in this rural area checking on her patients.
“She had been told it was Jean Charles, so she came to the house to prepare us before she gave us the news. She took our blood pressure; she gave us some medication. I didn’t know why I was being given so many pills. I wondered if I was sick. What were they going to tell me?
“I asked, ‘Dr Sandra, am I sick? Why are you giving me so many different tablets?’ She said, ‘You’re not too well. These will be good for you.’ I trusted her.
“Then she told us they had killed our son. And even after all the medication, I fell backwards — there were two people holding my arms and I was swinging backwards and forwards. If it hadn’t been for those people holding me I probably would have injured myself.”
She rocks back and forth on the sofa in front of me, in demonstration of how she reacted to the unimaginable news. The memory of that day is all too real.
Maria speaks passionately, with animation. She talks with her hands, her eyes, her expressions as well as a voice textured with age. She has just turned 80 and her face carries the furrows of a hardworking life. Her joints hurt but her heart aches even more.
“I became very unwell after Jean Charles was killed. The grief hasn’t changed. He is never out of my mind or out of my heart. I have the same feeling today as when I first heard the news. I had to make a great deal of effort to carry on. I pray and I put on a brave face but my heart is always hurting.”
London’s deadliest terror attack
The fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is the subject of Suspect, a new four-part drama being screened on Disney+. It is a story told against the backdrop of July 7, 2005, the day four terrorist bombers killed themselves and 52 innocent people on three Tube trains and a double decker bus.
It may have been Britain’s Kennedy moment. Everyone remembers where they were, remembers trying to call loved ones and the tightening grip of anxiety because the phone networks were down. Long lines of people began walking miles and miles out of the City, trying to get home. London echoed all day to the sound of sirens. Families and friends plastered walls and lampposts and bus stops with pictures of people they could not find.
• I don’t want to meet Jean Charles de Menezes’s family, says Met marksman
Then two weeks later, on July 21, it almost happened again. Four men tried to detonate similar bombs in a copycat attack. The detonators worked, but the main explosive charge — a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour packed into plastic buckets with handfuls of nails and screws — did not go off.
The men ran and a huge police manhunt began. The bombers might have had access to more devices; they had to be stopped. Police were tense. An SAS unit was deployed on the capital’s streets.
It was Jean Charles’s misfortune that the flat he shared with cousins in Tulse Hill was in the same block as one occupied by a would-be bomber, Hussain Osman. Police found Osman’s gym card on the train he tried to blow up at Shepherd’s Bush and put the block of flats under surveillance.
Two decades on, many people still have a garbled recollection of what happened to Jean Charles. They know he was innocent, that he was shot by mistake. But the idea persists that there was a reason police suspected him.
“I had a kind of Met-approved version of what happened in my head,” says Jeff Pope, the screenwriter who penned Suspect. “I was aware it was a tragedy and he was an innocent man. But somewhere at the back of my mind I had the idea he’d been behaving suspiciously. I had this image of him vaulting the barriers and running into the Tube, maybe late for his train or maybe he didn’t have a ticket. It was a tragedy, but it was understandable that the Met did what they did.”
The reality, as Pope found in his painstaking research, was that this was a totally avoidable death. The drama draws heavily on two official inquiry reports, the transcript of a health and safety trial (where the Met was fined £175,000) and the records of a coroner’s inquest. Then it lays out the sobering facts of a catastrophic police failure.
A surveillance officer at the block of flats had been peeing in a plastic bottle in the back of a van when Jean Charles emerged from the doorway, and did not get a clear look at him. Other surveillance officers tailed him as he boarded a No 2 bus. None were certain he was the Ethiopian-born Osman. They variously described Jean Charles as “a white male”, “North African”, “possibly identical” to Osman and having “Mongolian eyes”.
When Jean Charles got off the bus and then quickly reboarded, the police decided it was an anti-surveillance manoeuvre. In fact, he got back on the bus because Brixton Tube station was closed.
Uncertainty and confusion
At Scotland Yard’s control room there was uncertainty and confusion. Senior officers struggled to hear radio transmissions from the teams on the ground; at one point they asked for a “percentage” of how likely it was that the man on the bus was the bomber. Firearms officers had been briefed to expect to confront and incapacitate a suicide bomber. They were running an hour late.
It was those armed officers whom witnesses saw jumping the ticket barriers minutes after Jean Charles (who had no rucksack) calmly walked into Stockwell station, picked up a copy of the Metro newspaper and tapped his Oyster card to gain entry. Two officers — Charlie 2 and Charlie 12 — hurtled down the escalator, onto the train and shot him dead.
And then the Metropolitan Police began a reputation management operation that would last for years and come to overshadow the remarkable investigation that led to all the 21/7 bombers being captured and convicted.
Sir Ian Blair, then Met commissioner, now sitting in the House of Lords, told a press conference the shooting at Stockwell was “directly linked” to the failed bombings the day before. The dead man, he wrongly claimed, was “challenged and refused to obey”.
The Met did not correct that account even when they discovered it was wrong. A whistleblower at the police complaints watchdog leaked the truth to ITV News. She was sacked and later arrested.
Stories found their way into the press saying Jean Charles had been accused of rape (it wasn’t him) or had overstayed his visa. Undercover police officers infiltrated the Justice for Jean campaign to gather “intelligence”.
Cressida Dick, the gold commander when Jean Charles was shot, with overall responsibility for the operation, told a court she would not change the decisions she made on that day. Dick later became Met commissioner and was made a dame.
At the inquest into the death (held at the Oval cricket ground in 2008), the Met’s lawyers suggested a tiny amount of cocaine in Jean Charles’s bloodstream may have led him to appear twitchy and nervous. Seventeen Tube passengers who saw him shot disagreed.
The coroner refused to allow the jury to return an “unlawful killing” verdict. The jurors instead delivered an open verdict and added they did not believe Jean Charles had behaved in a suspicious or threatening manner. They also rejected police claims that officers had shouted a warning before opening fire.
It was their desire for these facts to be represented, so that memories might be corrected, that persuaded the Menezes family to work with the film-makers.
“I wanted to tell the story again because so many lies were told about my son’s death,” Maria says. “They said he jumped the barrier — he never jumped the barrier; the police jumped the barrier. My son was not an aggressive person. They said he was on drugs; that was another lie. I was hearing these lies and I never believed any of it because I knew my son.”
‘The police blamed my son for things he didn’t do’
The family have had a preview of the finished series at home in Brazil.
“I wanted to see the film to see it telling the truth. I wanted to see that it showed what I always believed,” Maria says. “I never believed the police. We knew Jean Charles. We wanted to clear his name and I believe in this film they were showing the truth.”
It was a hard watch, especially the chilling and graphic depiction of the shooting, but Maria says it should be seen.
“I was very upset the first day I watched it. For three days I didn’t feel well. My head was heavy, my heart was hurting. It moved me very much. My son Giovani as well, he was very moved. Especially the shooting scene. It’s important, people should see it, but I don’t want to see it again.
“I hope this clears away all the lies and I hope they are now ashamed of the lies they told. I hope it will show the mistakes the police made and how they blamed my son for things he didn’t do.”
Many families in rural Brazil have lots of children but Maria and her husband, Matosinhos, 85, only had two sons — Jean Charles and Giovani, his older brother by six years.
“It was very difficult for me to have children. I was only able to have two. Jean Charles was always a very good son. He was always happy and kind to everyone. He was a good person to be around because he was always positive and smiling.”
When he moved away, first to Sao Paolo and then to London, Maria missed him. But she was also proud that he was doing well, working hard.
“He always tried to put our minds at ease. I would tell him I was worried about him being so far away and he would tell me, ‘Don’t worry. This is a good country and I must work hard while I’m still young. I’m not going to abandon you and Dad. I will look after you in your old age.’ He always comforted us.
“He called often. The telephone was quite far from our house but I would walk there to take his call. He said, ‘When I marry, I want to marry a Brazilian woman because if I marry a British woman she might want to stay here.’ ”
Sadness weighs heavily on Maria in her old age. She did not want and does not like the limelight that comes to find her when the death of her son is discussed.
But, she tells me quietly, while time has not eased her grief, it has lessened her anger. The fury was at its height when, at the time of Jean Charles’s funeral, the Met sent a senior officer to Brazil with an ex-gratia payment to help cover funeral expenses.
“I was very angry at everything then. I was angry there were no arrests. I wanted the officers arrested for what they did.
“But with time I have asked God to help me, to clean my heart, clean my mind of all this hatred. I realised I have to accept what cannot be changed. Nothing will bring my son back and I believe God will look after us.
“I have nothing against the UK; I still think it is a beautiful country. The only thing that hurts is the loss of my son — this is where his life came to an end and nothing will ever change that. But he’s still alive inside me; I carry him with me. I don’t hate anyone or anything.”
Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is on Disney+ from April 30
