LONDON, 20 August 2005 — Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair yesterday hit back at allegations of a cover-up over the mistaken killing by anti-terror police of 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes a day after the failed London bombings on July 21. He dismissed any notion that he had tried to block an independent inquiry into the death by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and rejected calls for his resignation by the family of de Menezes for dishing out “lie after lie” in the weeks after the fatal shooting.

“These allegations strike to the heart of the integrity of the police and integrity of the Met and I fundamentally reject them. There is no cover-up,” he said in a statement to the Evening Standard.

“It is important that Londoners hear this: If you were going to define how to do a cover-up you would not write a letter to the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, copying it to the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA)and the chairman of the IPCC. That unique situation was that I and everyone who advised me believed that the man we had shot was a suicide bomber and therefore one of the four people who we were looking for, or someone else. It seemed to be utterly vital that the counterterrorism investigation took precedence — the forensics, the ballistics, the explosives,” he said.

Yesterday Allesandro Perreira, cousin of de Menezes echoed the call for Sir Ian to resign and for the British government to “bring the killers of his cousin to justice.”

Documents leaked this week revealed that de Menezes did not flee police by leaping a ticket barrier at Stockwell station, nor was he wearing a heavy coat that could have concealed a bomb, as claimed by Metropolitan Police at the time. It also emerged that he had already been restrained by a police officer when he was shot seven times in the head in front of a carriage full of horrified commuters.