Shooting to Kill

Just flicking through the newspaper front pages on the BBC site today shows me that the tabloids are back to business as usual with their hyperbolic headlines. The Daily Express reads: “SHOOT ALL BOMBERS. After police kill terrorist, demand grows for suicide fanatics to be shown no mercy.” And The Sun: “ONE DOWN… THREE TO GO.”

All very gung-ho and no doubt it appeals to the suburban Rambos as they gather with their mates for another quick ten pints at the local, but hardly very sensible.

I am certain the security forces did not want to kill their suspect yesterday: Dead men tell no tales. When it’s information that we want, killing the people who hold it serves no purpose.

The Daily Mail exclaims: “As SAS-trained marksmen execute a suspect on the Tube, the desperate hunt for these suicide bombers […]” While I suppose it is technically true that the suspect was ‘executed’ both the use of that word and the use of ‘desperate’ make for a very dramatic headline – which I don’t think reflects the reality. The police are certainly putting lots of resources into the hunt, but I would hardly say they were desperate. And as for it being an execution, that sounds rather more deliberate than it looks on the face of things.

Even the Guardian gets in on the act, headlining a witness quote; "They held the pistol to him and unloaded five shots."

The Financial Times highlights what it calls new ‘shoot to kill’ guidelines in this article although all of its information appears to come from the fact that police deliberately shot dead a suspect. (Great investigative journalism, that!) Personally I don’t think the guidelines are new, I just think that this is the first time they have needed to be used. A friend of mine who works for the City Of London police discussed this kind of thing with me a year or two ago: If you, as a policeman, are faced with someone who is carrying a bomb in a public place whom you strongly believe is determined to imminently blow up himself amid a crowd of people, then your options for preventing that happening are very limited:

You can’t negotiate with a suicide bomber because you have nothing to give them that they want; they believe they are going to Heaven in a few minutes – what is there to talk about? How likely is it that you can wrest the bomb away from them before they can detonate it, particularly if it’s a bomb-belt? Do you know enough about how they can detonate the bomb to be able to restrain them before they can get to it?

From what I can determine of this shooting, the suspect had emerged from a house that was being observed as part of the investigation into bombings on the Tube, he was going into a Tube station, he failed to stop when told to do so by armed police officers and he ran onto a train. I have heard unconfirmed reports that he was wearing an unseasonably bulky coat and wearing a belt with ‘wires’ coming out of it. At this stage I am willing to give the police the benefit of the doubt.

There will be, as there should be, an inquiry into this ‘extra-judicial killing’ but I don’t believe the police are out there gunning for anyone of Asian appearance who happens to be acting a bit oddly. I return to my earlier point: I doubt the police actually wanted to kill him at all, but given their suspicions and his actions I don’t believe they had a choice.