On 22 July 2005, 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed by firearms officers on the London underground shortly after boarding a train. The information relayed by the Metropolitan police at the time was that he had leapt over the ticket barriers at Stockwell station and was wearing a bulky coat under which officers thought he was hiding a bomb.
The incident occurred two weeks after the 7/7 bombings on London’s transport network, where 52 people were killed, and the day after a copycat attack in which four men tried – and mercifully failed – to detonate devices on three underground trains and a bus; the bombers in the latter incidents fled the scene, triggering a police manhunt. It later emerged that De Menezes was innocent and the intelligence on him was flawed. But such was the impact of that early narrative – the one where his actions and appearance made him seem guilty at a time when police were on high alert – that, 20 years on, it is still what most people remember.
It’s certainly what screenwriter Jeff Pope (Philomena, Stan & Ollie) recalled when he was first approached about writing the drama series Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. “My subconscious memory was that it was a terrible accident, where Jean Charles had unwittingly been the architect of his own downfall, because he had vaulted the barrier and run down the escalator. And when the firearms officers got on the train, he challenged them and it all ended in horror.” But then Pope did some digging, reading the two Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) reports, the inquest transcript plus the 2007 health and safety at work prosecution, where a jury found the Met police had breached health and safety rules and put the public at risk. From these, he gleaned that De Menezes had in fact walked into the station, picked up a newspaper and got on the train without incident. “I was certain by the time I had absorbed the research that this was a poorly planned and poorly executed operation that morning.”
A tense and frequently shocking ensemble piece written by Pope and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, Suspect details the before, during and after of the shooting, laying out the events that led to the misidentification of De Menezes, the shooting in the train carriage and the ensuing prevarications and inconsistencies from police. We see De Menezes, played by newcomer Edison Alcaide, in the days before his death, working two jobs – an electrician by day, he washed dishes in a restaurant at night – and talking to his mother back in Brazil who frets about her son living in a city where bombers are targeting civilians. We also meet the Met’s top brass including commissioner Ian Blair (Conleth Hill), who rushes out public statements before he has all the facts; Cressida Dick (Emily Mortimer), gold commander of the surveillance operation that led to De Menezes’s shooting; and deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick (played by Russell Tovey), who is appalled at the circulating half-truths and smears on De Menezes’ character. “It’s like we’re saying: ‘Sorry we killed you, but it is your own fault,’” he remarks to another officer.
Before taking the role, Tovey already knew Paddick, having met him through Stonewall and Terrence Higgins Trust events. “I’ve always found him a bit of a hero figure as an out gay man who had got to that position within the Met while being vocal about LGBTQI+ rights,” he says. “To be able to hang out with him and pick his brains for this was a wonderful situation to be in.” In the aftermath of the shooting, a question mark hung over exactly when senior officers knew the wrong man had been shot, and whether they released deliberately misleading information about De Menezes, knowing he was innocent. Paddick gave evidence that contradicted statements made by Blair – the implication being that Blair had lied. This ultimately led to Paddick being sidelined at the Met and leaving his job. “So you see what sticking your neck on the line and making sure the truth is upheld does to someone’s career,” says Tovey.
In the drama, there is an impossibly tense standoff between Paddick and Blair, with Paddick politely asserting his version of the timeline and Blair calmly and repeatedly telling his deputy he is mistaken. “You must do what you have to do,” says Blair, “but we both know the penalty for not telling the truth.” “That’s where good drama comes in,” says Game of Thrones star Conleth Hill, who plays Blair. “Nobody knows what happened in those meetings apart from the two of them. But [as an actor] you can’t torture yourself about that when you’ve got a good script in front of you.” Though Blair emerges from the story as slippery and over concerned about reputation, Hill says he is sympathetic to the pressure he was under “during all this panic” and was never going to play him as an out-and-out villain. “The responsibility is to tell the story, not his story. My father was a news cameraman during the worst of the Troubles and I always admired his unbiased presentation, no matter what he felt himself.”
While making Suspect, Pope was in close contact with the De Menezes family, who he says wanted Jean Charles’s story to be told accurately, and the misconceptions about him to be corrected. This was a responsibility keenly felt by Brazilian actor Edison Alcaide in playing De Menezes. “As a story, it hits close to home,” he says. He knew little of the shooting until he moved to London from Brazil in 2008 where his first home happened to be in Stockwell. “I remember seeing the memorial [containing a mosaic image of De Menezes] outside the tube – that was my first contact with Jean Charles – and thinking: ‘What is this about?’ And of course, the first thing I heard was: ‘Oh, he reacted to the police. He ran away.’”
The most shocking scenes in Suspect arrive in the chaos of the shooting – De Menezes was shot at close range seven times in the head – and the blood-soaked stillness that follows. “They were heavy days,” says Alcaide of the filming, noting that the cast and crew wanted “to make the story as truthful as possible. None of us wanted to avoid the tough reality of what happened.” Pope adds: “We thought long and hard about it; we wanted to show exactly what happened, how violent his death was. Seven shots to the head: that actually takes a long time. [Jean Charles’s mother] Maria said to us afterwards: ‘I watched it, and I’m glad I saw it. I’ll never watch it again.’”
There is another quietly heroic figure who is often overlooked in accounts of the Menezes case: Lana Vandenberghe, a Canadian secretary and whistleblower at the IPCC who observed with dismay the disconnect between what the public were being told and the evidence being collected by her organisation. And so she photocopied the evidence, put it in a folder and gave it to a journalist at ITN – a decision that cost her her job. In Suspect, she is played by Laura Aikman, who knew nothing of this part of the story. But Pope and producer Kwadjo Dajan had interviewed Vandenberghe as part of their research “and they pretty much asked everything I would want to ask her”, Aikman says. “So I had snippets of that interview saved on my phone. [What was clear] was that she was really scared … because she knew what the consequences could be for her.”
Police later raided Vandenberghe’s flat and took her in for questioning. While she was in custody, interviewing officers threatened to charge her with stealing ink and paper. “Ink and paper!” exclaims Pope. “These are gifts to a writer. You can see how desperate they were to land a glove on Lana. They could have put out a statement and talked about breach of trust, or that she was working in confidence. But to try and charge her with criminal theft, it’s pathetic.”
If there is an overarching theme in Suspect, beyond the horrific injustice of the killing of De Menezes, it is the long-term impact of misinformation. “In the world we live in now,” reflects Pope, “there are so many grabs on the truth, so I think that makes this piece really relevant.”
Tovey agrees: “The truth doesn’t matter any more … so we have to make these shows because art can educate and bring about change.” He points to the conversations around young men in the wake of Netflix’s hit drama Adolescence. “If you dramatise something, it brings it into existence in a way that no other medium really can. We need these series to tell us who we are and to hold people accountable.”
Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is on Disney+ from 30 April.
