UK officers won't face charges over metro shooting

LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) British police officers who shot dead an innocent Brazilian in London last year in the mistaken belief he was a suicide bomber will not face criminal charges, state prosecutors said today.

Instead, London's Metropolitan Police force will be prosecuted under health and safety laws over the July 22, 2005 shooting on a metro train of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian who was living in the British capital.

''The two officers who fired the fatal shots did so because they thought that Mr de Menezes had been identified to them as a suicide bomber and that if they did not shoot him he would blow up the train killing many people,'' Stephen O'Doherty, a senior Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyer, said in a statement.

''In order to prosecute those officers we would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt they did not honestly and genuinely hold those beliefs.

''In fact, the evidence supports their claim that they genuinely believed Mr de Menezes was a suicide bomber.'' Firearms officers shot de Menezes seven times in the head after he boarded a train on London's underground system, known as the Tube.

The shooting came amid frenzy in London over the threat of suicide attacks. Just 15 days earlier four British Islamists had blown themselves up on Tube trains and a bus, killing 52 innocent people.

The circumstances of the killing have been hotly disputed.

What were said to be eyewitness accounts, printed in British newspapers in the days following it, claimed de Menezes vaulted a barrier at the station and ran down an escalator.

They also claimed the Brazilian was wearing a bulky coat which could have been hiding a bomb.

Sources at Britain's Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which investigated the shooting, have dismissed those claims and said de Menezes walked into the station, went calmly to the platform and walked on to the train.

London's police chief Ian Blair has apologised to the de Menezes family for the killing but has been criticised for claiming at the time it was ''directly linked'' to police anti-terrorist operations.

Blair, Britain's most senior police officer, has remained under pressure since then.

De Menezes has become something of a martyr figure for campaigners who say the police have ignored civil rights in a heavy-handed crackdown on terrorist suspects.

Those accusations were fuelled by another botched police operation in June this year, when police shot and injured an innocent Muslim man in a raid on his house in East London.

REUTERS SHB RN1750