LONDON, Sept 13: A shoot-to-kill policy for suspected suicide bombers was reviewed following the death of an innocent Brazilian man in London but remains in place, Britain’s top police officer said on Tuesday.
Ian Blair, head of London’s Metropolitan Police, came face to face with relatives of electrician Jean Charles de Menezes as he appeared before an influential panel of lawmakers at the House of Commons.
The all-party Home Affairs Select Committee quizzed Blair, as well as interior minister Charles Clarke, at length about the official response to the London bombings in July.
On July 22, de Menezes was shot repeatedly in the head by police officers at a London Underground subway station in circumstances which are still being investigated.
The incident came a day after a seemingly failed wave of suicide bomb attacks on subway trains and a bus. Two weeks before, 52 people and four suicide bombers were killed in a near-identical set of attacks.
The presumed July 7 bombers were later identified as Muslim British nationals.
Blair said on Tuesday his force was “extremely sorry” for the death and was determined to find out what took place. But he defended the shoot-to-kill policy, while conceding it should be debated fully.
“I think a watershed has been passed and I think now we have to find a process for debating these issues without necessarily revealing the absolute detail of the tactics, which would be extremely unhelpful,” he told the committee.
“There is no question that a suicide bomber, deadly and determined, who is intent on murder, is perhaps the highest level of threat that we face and we must have an option to deal with it.
“We reviewed it (the policy) just after July 22. We made a small number of administrative changes but the essential thrust of the tactics remains the same.”
Earlier, Clarke warned that Britain faces a long-term threat from “nihilist” terror gangs, with no end to the danger in sight.
Asked how long he expected the terrorist threat to endure, Mr Clarke said: “I would not like to put a time period on it.
“The fact is that we have what I would call a nihilist terrorist threat, something that will only be beaten by demonstrating it cannot succeed.”
Unlike terrorists in Northern Ireland who had “a specific political ambition”, the suicide bombers who struck the British capital had no clearly definable aims, Clarke said.
“But I do believe we will get to a state of affairs where we have demonstrated that we are simply not going to be shifted from defending our societies,” he added.
John Denham, the lawmaker who chairs the committee, said earlier Tuesday that specific questions about the bombings and de Menezes’s death could not be asked due to ongoing investigations and court cases.
Instead, the session would help MPs to “take stock” of the official response to the bombings and the government’s wider strategy on terrorism, Denham told BBC radio.
In his evidence, Clarke said that “hundreds” of terrorism suspects were being monitored.
“There are certainly hundreds of people who we believe need to be very closely surveyed because of the threat they offer,” he said.
The minister rejected criticism by rights groups of planned government deals with Middle Eastern and North African countries allowing terror suspects to be sent back to their country of origin on the understanding they will not be maltreated.
“Some say that the memoranda of understanding aren’t worth the paper they are written on,” Clarke said.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Iqbal Sacranie, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, were also due to appear later.—AFP
