London police chief likely to be cleared over shooting

LONDON, Aug 1 (Reuters) London's police chief is expected to be cleared of lying in a report released on Thursday into the aftermath of the fatal shooting of an innocent Brazilian man mistaken for a suicide bomber, police sources said.

Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was shot in the head seven times by officers as he boarded an underground train in south London on July 22, 2005.

Detectives from London's Metropolitan Police had mistaken him for Hussein Osman, one of four men convicted last month of trying to set off homemade bombs on the British capital's transport system the day before de Menezes was shot dead.

The long-awaited report by Britain's independent police watchdog is expected to conclude that Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair had not lied to the public over the incident which was hugely embarrassing for the London force.

Blair told reporters at the time that the shooting was directly linked to the massive police investigation into those botched bombings. An official statement from the police also said his clothing and behaviour had been suspicious.

Blair said he was unaware that officers had shot the wrong man until 24 hours later, when he publicly apologised and admitted they had been wrong.

NO DELIBERATE WRONGDOING Police sources told Reuters that the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report was likely to clear Blair of any deliberate wrongdoing.

However, the Guardian newspaper said that Andy Hayman, head of London's police specialist operations unit, who also had a major public profile at the time, would be criticised.

The paper, without citing its source, said Hayman was aware of unconfirmed rumours that officers had killed the wrong man on the evening of July 22 but failed to pass this information onto Blair until the next day when the information was confirmed.

A spokeswoman for de Menezes's family, who has accused Blair of lying and senior officers of staging a cover-up, said they hoped the IPCC report would meet its expectations.

''We hope it's a full, thorough investigation of all the pertinent facts to do with the lies put in the public domain by the police,'' she said.

The Metropolitan Police has repeatedly pointed out that the force was under unprecedented pressure.

Two weeks earlier, on July 7, four young British Islamists had carried out the first suicide bombing in western Europe killing 52 commuters on three London underground trains and a bus.

The botched July 21 attacks were an almost identical attack, although no one was killed as the bombs failed to explode, and had prompted Britain's biggest ever manhunt.

''It's very easy to forget the context in which this was happening,'' a senior counter terrorism officer said recently.

Last year prosecutors decided that no individual officers involved in the shooting should face criminal action over the incident itself.

Instead the Crown Prosecution Service ruled that the London force should be prosecuted as a whole under health and safety laws. The trial is due to start in October.

REUTERS ARB RN1951