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Four undercover police officers spied on the justice campaign run by the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man shot dead by police on the tube in 2005, the spycops public inquiry has heard.
The surveillance took place while the grieving family was seeking to hold the Metropolitan police to account and uncover the truth of why officers had mistaken him for a suicide bomber when they shot him seven times in the head.
The catastrophic mistake caused a huge crisis for Scotland Yard and its reputation.
Among the surveillance reports is one recording that the family was going to lay flowers at an event to commemorate his death.
Giving evidence to the inquiry on Thursday, Patricia Armani da Silva, the cousin of de Menezes, said she was “deeply shocked we were spied on”.
She said the family conducted their campaign peacefully. “At no point did I or the people within our campaign ever advocate or condone public disorder, breaking the law or subversion of any kind.”
Scotland Yard kept a secret file on the family’s campaign, logging details of meetings they were involved in and identifying important supporters and their email addresses.
The Met has admitted that its covert monitoring of the family’s campaign was “wholly unjustifiable”.
In July 2005, police firearms officers killed de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician, at Stockwell tube station in London. He was wrongly identified as one of the fugitives involved in a failed bombing two weeks after the 7/7 attack in London, which killed 52 people. No police officers were prosecuted, although the Met was fined for breaking health and safety laws.
Da Silva said the family had to spend much of its time correcting the repeated lies that the police had spread about de Menezes. The lies, she said, started soon after he was killed and originated from the top of Scotland Yard.
For instance, senior officers falsely claimed that de Menezes had failed to respond to a police challenge before he was shot and had been wearing suspiciously bulky clothing.
Da Silva questioned why the police believed it was necessary for an undercover officer, Robert Hastings, to attend the public launch of the family’s campaign and file a report to his supervisors.
Another undercover officer adopted the fake name of Simon Wellings to infiltrate leftwing groups for six years. His superiors, outlining the central aims of his deployment, wrote: “The reaction of activists to the police shooting in Stockwell, following the London suicide bombings, has been, and will continue to be, closely monitored” by Wellings.
He reported to his managers that the campaign was to hold a commemoration for de Menezes six months after he was killed. Flowers were to be laid at Stockwell tube station.
In her written statement, da Silva said: ”I find it disheartening and disturbing that the state would intrude on our grief and plan their response to our prayers and flower laying. I was not aware and could not conceive of being spied on when all we wanted was a peaceful expression for justice.”
Carlo Soracchi, another undercover officer who infiltrated leftwing groups, also gathered information on the campaign. In an official document directing his work, his managers wrote in September 2005 that Soracchi “is also providing intelligence on the reaction of activists to the shooting by police of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell”.
Last week, Soracchi was asked why he submitted a report about activists who were likely to support the family, three days after the killing. He replied: “I think there would have been a desire for any intelligence that we could pick up whilst out and deployed to be fed into the policing sort of plan, as it were.”
The inquiry, led by the retired judge Sir John Mitting, is examining the conduct of about 139 undercover officers who infiltrated mainly leftwing and progressive groups between 1968 and 2010.
One of the issues is how, over decades, the undercover officers repeatedly spied on grieving families whose relatives had been killed by police or died in custody. These included high-profile cases such as the campaign for justice after the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Police have argued that the monitoring of these families was merely incidental as their main aim was to spy on activists who were supporting them to see if they were exploiting their campaigns.
