In 2007, Londoners were living in fear. Four suicide bombers had detonated homemade explosives on the capital’s transport network on July 7, killing 57 people – and just a fortnight later, four more young men tried to do exactly the same thing.
Tragedy was being averted because their devices failed to go off, with all four managing to flee the scene and The pressure was squarely on the Metropolitan Police to arrest the gang before they tried again. Looking back two decades, it’s hard to overstate the impact it had on everyone who lived and worked in the city, as fellow commuters who normally did their best to ignore one another instead began to regard one another with suspicion.
Thrust into the limelight was Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian electrician who was just going about his daily business, having moved to the UK in 2002 on a student visa.
As he left for Stockwell Underground Station on the morning of July 22 – a day after the bungled attacks – Mr de Menezes was presumably oblivious to the fact that armed police were deployed under a shoot-to-kill policy known as Operation Kratos, intended to stop suspected bombers before they could act.
Crucially, surveillance officers mistakenly identified Mr de Menezes as one of the failed bombers, Hussain Osman, who had links to another property in the building in Tulse Hill, south London, where he was living.
Following him to Stockwell Underground Station, armed officers then rushed the carriage of the Northern Line train which he had boarded seconds earlier, at which point one of them shot him seven times in the head at point-blank range.
Initial police statements contained several inaccuracies, including claims, pushed by among others then-Met Police Commissioner Ian Blair, that Mr de Menezes had vaulted over ticket barriers and was wearing a heavy coat.
CCTV footage later disproved these accounts, leading to public outcry and accusations of a cover-up.
There were also erroneous claims that Mr de Menezes had ignored police instructions to stop and had instead run from them, and that he had overstayed his visa and was in the country illegally.
No individual officer was prosecuted in connection with his death, but the Metropolitan Police was found to have breached health and safety laws and was fined £175,000.
The inquest jury returned an open verdict, rejecting police claims that Mr de Menezes had posed an immediate threat.
His death became a symbol of the dangers of police misinformation and excessive force and also led to widespread criticism of the Met’s handling of counterterrorism operations, and lasting questions about accountability and use of lethal force in public policing.
Just hours later, one of the four, Yasin Hassan Omar, was arrested in Birmingham, while Osman was arrested a week after that, in Rome, the same day Muktar Said Ibrahim and Ramzi Mohammed were detained in a flat in London.
Speaking to the Guardian prior to Tuesday’s anniversary, on which Mr de Menezes’ friends and supporters staged a vigil in his memory, his cousin, Patricia da Silva Armani, said she did not believe the police involved should be prosecuted.
She explained: “The big mistake was in the communications and surveillance and that they allowed Jean to go into the station. When Jean was allowed to go down the escalator at Stockwell station he was already dead. The shooters had no choice, no choice.”