Patricia da Silva Armani was living with her cousin Jean Charles de Menezes in a flat in south London two decades ago when he was shot seven times in the head by firearms officers at Stockwell station. Her younger cousin was a chatterbox and a dreamer, she says, “always with plans”.
The pair had grown up together as part of a large and close family. Two years after De Menezes had moved to London for a life that Brazil was unable to offer, “Paty”, as he affectionately called her, had been encouraged to follow him to his two-bedroom flat on Scotia Road, along with their younger cousin Vivian Figueiredo, then 20.
De Menezes, 27, intended to work another six months as an electrician in London before returning home to Brazil to rejoin his girlfriend, Adriana, she says. They had talked it over during what would turn out to be their final hours with each other in the home they shared. “I love you,” De Menezes had said as he gave Da Silva Armani, then 31, a hug before leaving her side for the last time to go to work.
Within 48 hours, De Menezes, on the way to a job in Kilburn, was lying dead on a tube carriage floor. Police officers had mistaken him for Hussain Osman, one of the four men who attempted to blow themselves up on London trains and a bus the previous day in a failed copycat of the 7/7 bombings that had killed 52 people and left hundreds more wounded two weeks earlier.
Da Silva Armani collapsed as she identified her cousin in the police morgue on 23 July. But she became a key player in the campaign for justice after compelling evidence of catastrophic police errors and New Scotland Yard’s dissemination of misinformation emerged via leaks to the press. More would come out in two damning Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) reports, the Met’s trial and conviction under health and safety laws, and the formal inquest into the killing in 2008.
It was in Da Silva Armani’s name that the campaign then vainly sought to challenge the Crown Prosecution Service at the European court of human rights after a decision was made not to charge any officers over the killing.
It is evidently then with some trepidation that she answers the question as to whether she still believes the firearms officers, whose claims that they shouted a warning of “armed police” was not believed by the jury at the inquest, should have been prosecuted.
“You may be surprised by my answer: no, absolutely not,” she says. “Because the whole situation led them to this. I take many years to get this conclusion. Many, many years. It’s not easy. You are the first person I said it [to].
“The big mistake was in the communications and surveillance and that they allowed Jean to go into the station. When Jean was allowed to go down the escalator at Stockwell station he was already dead. The shooters had no choice, no choice.”
It is not a position that everyone remembering De Menezes at Stockwell station at 10.05am – the time of his death – on Tuesday will back. It has taken a lot of tears and reflection to get to this moment, she says.
She certainly believes that those at the top of the Met then – namely the late commissioner Ian Blair, made Lord Blair of Boughton in 2010, and Cressida Dick, who was running the operation on 22 July 2005 and who rose to lead the Met in 2017 – acted shamefully and should have been held to account for their failings.
De Menezes had only been followed by surveillance officers from the flat on 17 Scotia Road that fateful day as a result of Osman having put down number 21 as his address when registering at a gym – the flats shared a communal entrance. Osman’s membership card had been found in the detritus left when his homemade bomb failed at Shepherd’s Bush tube station.
There was only one officer in the van outside the property. He was urinating into a plastic container as De Menezes left and had been unable to get an image or a proper look.
Dick then decided not to suspend the bus services for fear of alerting the terrorists to their watch. De Menezes got on a bus, got off at Brixton and then got back on when he realised that the tube station was shut. It was wrongly interpreted as possible anti-surveillance measure.
Dick would claim that she was led by the surveillance team to believe it was likely to be Osman, who was later arrested in Rome, that they were following. There was a far greater level of doubt than that among the surveillance team. She wanted the firearms team to stop him before he got to the tube station but they were not yet in position to intervene.
The armed officers arrived around two minutes after De Menezes at Stockwell. Some accounts had Dick telling her subordinates to stop the suspect from getting on the tube “at all costs”. She denied that language. But the officers running into the tube station said they fully believed that the man they were engaging was a terrorist about to blow himself up.
The two shooters, C2 and C12, claimed in their formal statements that they had shouted “armed police” to De Menezes as they rushed at him and that he had risen from his seat towards them.
None of the 17 members of the public on the carriage heard any such warning. The jury at the inquest later said they did not believe the officer’s testimony and returned an open verdict after being prohibited by the coroner from an unlawful killing verdict.
The operational failures were followed by false claims from Blair and his press office that De Menezes had failed to respond to a police challenge and had been wearing suspiciously bulky clothing. It took a leak from a secretary at the IPCC to ITN’s News at Ten to reveal this as a falsehood.
Despite all this, when giving evidence at the inquest, Dick would not countenance suggestions from Michael Mansfield QC, representing De Menezes’ family, that errors had been made. Her only concession: “In any operation some things that in an ideal world would happen, don’t happen.”
Da Silva Armani says that the “arrogance” of the two senior officers is what remains with her today. She has learned more recently that the JusticeforJean campaign’s meetings were infiltrated by undercover officers for purposes unknown.
She will give evidence at the public inquiry into the so-called Spycops scandal. And yet, she says, she will not give into hate. Blair passed away earlier this month. “I felt nothing, it was strange”.
One of the officers, C12, spoke for the first time earlier this year for a Channel 4 documentary. “Everything told me I was going to die and that is why I acted like I did,” he told the programme.
Da Silva Armani says she “saw sadness in his eyes”, as she struggles to hold back her own tears. She could not watch the whole interview and felt only pity. “I have to forgive him,” she says.
A few weeks ago, her 10-year-old daughter had held back from joining her classmates having their photographs taken with the police officers at the school summer fair in south Croydon. “Because of our cousin”, the young girl had told her concerned mum.
“I said to her: ‘Listen to me, what happened with your cousin is an isolated case,’” said Da Silva Armani. “The police is good. The police is here for our protection, to serve us’ … We should not generate hate.” Her daughter joined her friends.
