Vivian Figueiredo stands in front of a mosaic dedicated to De Menezes outside Stockwell Underground station on the 10th anniversary of his death in London yesterday.
AFP/London
Relatives of Jean Charles de Menezes yesterday demanded justice outside the London Underground station where 10 years ago the Brazilian was mistaken for a suicide attacker and shot dead soon after the July 2005 bombings.
Exactly a decade on from the innocent electrician’s death, his cousins laid flowers and lit candles to mark the anniversary and reiterated their call for police officers to face prosecution.
Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at Stockwell station on July 22, 2005, the day after a botched attempt to replicate the attacks of July 7 when four suicide bombers killed 52 innocent people.
With London on high alert, police had followed him onto an Underground train in the mistaken belief he was failed suicide bomber Hussain Osman, who was then on the run and lived in Menezes’s block of flats.
By the mosaic outside Stockwell station which commemorates his life, his cousins Vivian Figueiredo, Alessandro Pereira and Erinaldo da Silva bowed their heads in a minute’s silence.
They wore black T-shirts reading “Justice for Jean”, in a logo that mixed the London Underground symbol with a crosshairs target.
The family has been through “10 long years of pain, struggle and determination to seek justice, to hold those who not only fired those fatal bullets, but also those who gave the order, to account,” a spokesman for the justice campaign told the dozens of well-wishers gathered outside the station.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) began hearing their case last month.
“He was just a beautiful person, a lovely son, a lovely friend, a lovely cousin,” Figueiredo, 32, said.
“We will keep going, keep fighting. I hope it’s not going to benefit only our family but also other families, other communities and people that the same has happened to. We do it as well to make sure that things like that do not happen again.”
Menezes loved life in London and had encouraged Figueiredo to join him. The pair lived together for two months before his killing, she said.
“A very exciting time for me became a nightmare. I had to take his body home,” she explained.
“I love my cousin, I miss him.”
In 2006, England’s independent state prosecutors decided no police officers should face charges, on the grounds of insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.
Some relatives are challenging that decision in the ECHR, though others are not involved in pursuing the case.
London’s police force as a whole was found guilty of breaching health and safety regulations and fined.
In 2008, an inquest jury returned an open verdict - rejecting their only other available alternative, to find it a “lawful killing”.
