Still

[senji]

I'm still not afraid, even though armed plainclothed police are shooting people who aren't terrorists on my nation's mass-transit system.

Angry, defensive, paranoid; but not afraid.

Comments

[paleshadow]

I will likely lose my "rabid-left-wing college student" card for this, but I mostly side with the police here.

It is unfortunate, of course, that the man is dead, but reading the accounts of the situation, and taking into account the state of alert the police are in these days...what do you do, if you have the gun in your hand and you've every reason to believe that the next Tube bomber is in your sights, because he's panicked and hasn't stopped at a police challenge?

They're being castigated because they were wrong - if he'd been wearing explosives instead of a heavy jacket, they'd have been heroes and have saved fifty-odd lives at the cost of one. Imagine having split seconds to make that decision.

-D.

[itagne]

I will continue to be disturbed about this until it's clear they had some reason to believe he was a suicide bomber. This needs to be more than 'he ran away from the police'. I've run away from the police*, and I'm not a suicide bomber.

* Admittedly I was twelve, they weren't armed, and I didn't run onto the Tube in the middle of a terrorist scare. But you see what my point is: just running away from the police is no where near enough grounds for a decision that the runner is a suicide bomber. What else did they have?

[paleshadow]

No, just running away is clearly not enough reason, and no sane person could claim it was.

But, leaving a house that's being watched in connection with said terrorist scare, wearing clothing that's tailor-made to conceal explosives on a day that apparently doesn't require it, with, say, wires visibly hanging out (plausible, with the man being an electrician), and not stopping for a police challenge, but instead breaking into a run and vaulting turnstiles in an effort to board a train, when there have been six train bombs in the past two weeks?

This would seem to be rather pushing your luck, assuming the accounts I've been reading are anywhere close to accurate.

-D.

[itagne]

I'm not sure how much of this information is accurate -- in particular, I've yet to see any corroborated report that the guy had 'wires visibly hanging out' of his clothing. The only report that he was wearing 'clothing that's tailor-made to conceal explosives' is from eyewitness Mark Whitby, who said he was wearing 'quite a sort of thickish coat'. However, Whitby also said he was 'an Asian guy', so I'm not inclined to trust his commentary much -- de Menezes couldn't really look less Asian.

All in all, I want to wait to see what evidence the police actually had rather than indulging in speculation based on the mass of reports that were circulating in the immediate aftermath, most based on the inaccurate statement of a supposed eyewitness.