Empty petrol tanks and failing eyesight

Last Thursday morning both the Oval and Kennington tube stations were closed due to an electrical failure in one and, I think, a fire in the other.

The bombings on 7/7 were preceded by a similar spate of station closures and even though there is no proven connection between the closures and the bombings I always get a little nervous when a couple of stations are closed at the same time.

Anyway, I ended up having to use Stockwell Station.

I picked up a free copy of Metro, passed through, not over, the ticket barrier, went down the escalator and got onto a train.

Given that the anniversary of Jean Charles de Menezes shooting was only a couple of days off, I got to thinking, yet again, about all the unanswered questions from that day and the recent news that no one would be charged in connection with his death.

And, as luck would have it, that day’s Metro featured a story that offered a possible to solution to some of those outstanding questions.

The reason why a suspect suicide bomber was allowed onto the Underground and subsequently executed, even though he clearly couldn’t have been carrying a bomb, was because…

The police had forgotten to put petrol in their van!!!

The police unit involved in the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes was delayed by a petrol stop on their way to Stockwell Tube station, it was claimed yesterday.

The delay may have contributed to the failure to apprehend the 27-year old electrician before he entered the South London station on July 22 last year, a newspaper alleged.

The armed unit was not called into action for four hours even though Scotland Yard knew it was dealing with a suspected suicide bomber, it was claimed. Had it not been for this, the delay as the team stopped for refuel, and bad traffic, Mr de Menezes could have been arrested as he crossed open ground near his home in Tulse Hill, a report said. Officers would been unlikely to adopt a shoot-to-kill approach if that was the case.

They would have been able to spot that their target's clothing was unlikely to be concealing a bomb. Officers would also have been aware that mass casualties were unlikely in the open air, the Evening Standard claimed.

Nonsense like this is in the same league as the story that de Menezes was originally misidentified as a terrorist suspect because a surveillance officer couldn’t turn on a video camera when de Menezes left home for work because the officer was taking a leak at the time.

That would be a surveillance officer from the SAS-trained Special Reconnaissance Regiment.

And any armchair Rambo who’s read an Andy McNab or Chris Ryan novel knows that the SAS take a perverse pride in sitting in observation posts for weeks on end, slowly marinating in their own juices rather than taking their eye off their mark or giving themselves away.

The Metro article didn’t even start to explain how forgetting to put petrol in the van or having to go off for a piss could result in scrubbed CCTV tapes, faked surveillance logs, smear stories about innocent victims being leaked to the press, or having your boss going on national television and tell huge, ginormous porkers.

As far as I can tell, possible explanations for what happened that day essentially boil done to one of two scenarios -

The shooting was an innocent mistake and our police really do drive around without petrol in their vans, take a breezy, devil may care attitude to terrorist surveillance, mistake the words ‘stop him’ for ‘shoot him in the face seven times’ and generally run around the City with loaded firearms not knowing what the fuck they are doing.

Or

Something much darker took place that day and the people behind it are so arrogant they couldn’t be bothered to even cover it up properly.

Maybe these questions will be answered when the report of the speedy and independent investigation we were all promised last July is finally published. Only we have to wait a wee bit longer as it won’t be published until the start of next year at the earliest because it can’t be released until a bullshit Health and Safety case against the police goes to court.

By which time maybe the speedy and independent inquiry and inquest into Princess Diana’s death might also see the light of day and maybe someone might get round to doing a speedy and independent inquest into David Kelly’s death or, perish the thought, even the 7/7 bombings as well.

I honestly don't know if our country has always been this bent and I've only just started noticing or if something really has changed over the last few years. I really couldn't say.

For some reason the line ‘Just like a banana republic, but without the bananas’ comes to mind.