De Menezes Murder: More insult to injury

Via Martin Wisse:

Police officer who altered evidence in the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes has been cleared of "deliberate deception":

The Special Branch officer deleted text from his computer note before speaking to the inquest in October last year.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission said he was not guilty of "deliberate deception".

Mr de Menezes, 27, was shot dead by police at Stockwell Tube station in south London in July 2005.

The IPCC said the officer, known as "Owen", had acted naively, but found no evidence of deliberate deception.

Last October, the officer told the inquest he deleted a line from computer notes which quoted Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick.

The note had originally claimed Dick had initially said the electrician could "run onto Tube as not carrying anything".

But at the inquest he said: "On reflection, I looked at that and thought 'I cannot actually say that.'"

The officer, a supervisor in the operations room at Scotland Yard, told the court he had removed the line because he believed it was "wrong and gave a totally false impression."

The IPCC found Owen "acted alone" in failing to disclose the note and then deleting it.

Its report concluded the officer had shown a "lack of understanding" of how he should behave, but had not committed an offence.

Unbelievable, but not surprising. The socalled "Independent" Police Complaints Commission has shown time and again in the de Menezes case to be toothless or unwilling to actually prosecute the police. The IPCC is too much a part of the police establishment to do its job, either unwilling or unable to handle these sort of cases. As with parliament we once again see that self regulation does not work.