The “espionage” Anglo-Saxon monthly magazine Eye Spy, an advocate of arguments that could be described as leaning to the extreme right, issued in its edition of October 2005 a special report on the assassination of Jean-Charles de Menezes, which took place in the London subway on July 22, 2005. Although he had not shown any suspicious behaviour, the 27-year-old electrician was shot in the head several times at close-range by agents, whose names have not been disclosed, when he had just sat on a tube coach. After having fabricated a complicated story, to justify the mistake, indicating that Menezes was wearing an unseasonal thick coat and behaved strangely, Scotland Yard was obliged to recognize its mistake, although without totally clarifying the facts nor punishing the culprits.

Eye Spy, which boasts about having privileged sources within the special services of Her Majesty, revealed then to the readers the circumstances of the drama. In a first part, the reader learns that Hussain Osman’s hand phone, one of the alleged perpetrators of July 21 frustrated attacks, had been tracked from London to Italy, where Osman was finally arrested on July 26 thanks to the joint efforts of the U.S. NSA and the GCHQ (British services).

The second part, which was about Menezes, ended up revealing that, after a number of pirouettes and images from surveillance cameras, it appeared that Menezes was mistaken, according to “extremely reliable sources”, for Hussain Osman since his“appearance and constitution were similar”. The article further indicated that only by sitting near the victim the surveillance services realized it was not Osman, but it was too late because the other group was already coming to kill him! Apart from the method, which does not seem to bother Eye Spy, how many men in the same neighbourhood were that day in danger of being shot at close-range by policemen who were unable to distinguish between a black and a white man?

Arthur Lepic