UK police chief defends shooting

Leaked documents from the investigation into the case have exposed blunders and cast doubts on initial accounts from police and witnesses.

The shooting took place with the capital on edge, the day after a failed attempt to repeat suicide bombings by four British Muslims which killed 52 people on July 7.

‘‘At that time—and for the next 24 hours—I and everybody who advised me believed the person who was shot was a suicide bomber,’’ Blair told the News of the World newspaper.

Relatives of de Menezes have called on Blair to quit because of police mistakes and information they say was misleading. Blair said it was not until the morning after the shooting that he was informed an innocent man had been killed. ‘‘Somebody came in at 10.30 a.m. and said the equivalent of ‘Houston, we have a problem’,’’ he said. ‘‘I thought: ‘That’s dreadful. What are we going to do about that?’ ’’

But lawyers for the de Menezes family have voiced doubts that senior officers did not know the truth soon after the shooting.

‘‘We express incredulity that the senior police officer would have made extravagant claims from the outset without first informing themselves of the true facts,’’ lawyer Gareth Peirce, said.

Government Ministers said an independent inquiry must be allowed to proceed without prejudgment. ‘‘It was a terrible tragedy that that young lad was killed but… an independent inquiry is underway. Let us wait for the facts,’’ Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told BBC television. Blair defended his actions as two newspapers reported that units involved in the killing were blaming each other.

The Observer and Sunday Mirror said undercover officers who followed de Menezes—after he left an apartment block under observation after the botched bombings—did not believe he posed an immediate threat.

—Reuters

Qaeda plot on House of Commons ‘foiled’

LONDON: British police believe that they have thwarted a potential nerve gas attack by the Al Qaeda on the country’s Parliament, a media report said on Sunday. The plot against the House of Commons, hatched last year, is understood to have been discovered in coded e-mails on computers seized from terror suspects in Britain and Pakistan, The Sunday Times reported. ‘‘Police and MI5 (domestic intelligence agency) then identified an Al Qaeda cell that had carried out extensive research and video-recorded reconnaissance missions in preparation for the attack,’’ it said. PTI