London police deny report of compensation offer for slain Brazilian
(AP)
Updated: 2005-08-20 17:54

The family of a Brazilian man killed by officers who mistook him for a terrorist said they have rejected a US$1 million compensation offer from London's police force, a newspaper reported Saturday.London's Metropolitan Police denied making such an offer, reported AP.

Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was shot by undercover police who followed him onto a subway train on July 22, two weeks after four suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 other people on the London subway system.

"We will not be bought off. We will not be silenced," the Daily Mail quoted the man's parents, Matozinho and Maria de Menezes, as saying.

Metropolitan Police rejected the report. "The only discussions we have had so far with the family of Jean Charles de Menezes have been about initial expenses and we strongly refute any suggestion that a figure anywhere in the region of one million dollars has been offered as compensation," the force said in a statement Saturday.

The Daily Mail said John Yates, deputy assistant commissioner of Metropolitan Police, made the initial offer of compensation during a visit to Brazil two weeks ago.

"Money was being bandied about, but was not accepted," Yasmin Khan of the Justice4Jean campaign was quoted as saying.

On Friday, a cousin of the slain man called for the resignation of Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the London force.

"They have killed Jean and then told lies," Alessandro Pereira said, shedding tears at a nationally televised news conference in London.

"For the sake of my family, for the sake of the people of London, in Jean's name I say that those responsible should resign. Ian Blair should resign," Pereira said, referring to the capital's Metropolitan Police commissioner.

Blair, who apologized for the mistaken killing, has denied any police cover-up or trying to block the Independent Police Complaints Commission's investigation now under way.

Blair said he had not resisted the investigation, but only sought advice from the Home Office on how secret intelligence would be dealt with, given that the police complaints commission had a duty to disclose all its findings to the victim's family.

"What I actually said was we have a unique situation here. At that stage I, and my officers, thought the dead man was a suicide bomber," Blair said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"We are in the middle of the biggest counterterrorism operation, is it wise to bring another set of investigators into the middle of that?"

Blair told the BBC that police took responsibility for Menezes' death, but he said while it was tragic it was just one death out of 57 _ including the four suicide bombers.

"The context here is the largest criminal inquiry in English history with 52 innocent victims dead. ... We can't let that one tragic death outweigh all others," he said.

Recently leaked documents from the official complaints commission investigation into Menezes' killing appear to contradict original statements by police that the Brazilian had been behaving suspiciously.

On July 22, Blair told journalists that Menezes had failed to obey the instructions from the surveillance police who were following him as a suspected suicide bomber. In the heightened state of anxiety after the earlier terrorist attacks, witnesses reported that Menezes was wearing a heavy padded coat and jumped over ticket barriers at Stockwell subway station before bolting toward a train.

The Metropolitan Police never contradicted those claims.

However, the documents leaked to ITV News suggest that Menezes, an electrician, walked casually into the subway station and was wearing a light denim jacket.

Brazil's government said it was "outraged" by the reports about Menezes' killing, and said it would send two officials to Britain to meet with police and the commission investigating the killing.