The head of London’s police has slammed as ”an incredible risk” another force’s use of a high-voltage stun gun to subdue a suicide bomb suspect, saying it could have set off explosives.
In what amounted to a humiliating public dressing down for West Midlands police, metropolitan police head Ian Blair said his officers could not understand why the Taser stun gun was used.
Somali-born Yasin Hassan Omar was subdued with the stun gun as West Midlands police raided his hideout in the central England city of Birmingham on Wednesday.
The 24-year-old is suspected of trying to blow up an underground subway train near central London’s Warren Street station on July 21, one of four failed bombings on the city’s transport system that day.
Speaking on BBC television late on Thursday, Blair was highly critical when asked why the stun gun was used on Hassan Omar.
”I’ll be honest, we don’t understand how they could possibly. It was an incredible risk to use a Taser on a suicide bomber because the Taser itself could set it [a bomb] off and that is not the policy,” he said.
”I can’t imagine how that was used. We use Tasers in London regularly but a Taser sends electric currents into the body of somebody.
”If there is a bomb on that body, then the bomb can go off. I can’t imagine … it may be that it was clear there wasn’t a bomb, I don’t know what the situation was.”
Blair, who as Commissioner of the metropolitan police ranks as Britain’s most senior police officer, also defended his force’s shoot-to-kill tactics when faced with feared suicide bombers.
A week ago, 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was chased by police through a subway station and shot repeatedly in the head. The dead man was later found to have no terrorism connections.
”It’s worth recording that they [the police] obviously believed that the man was a suicide bomber and yet they ran towards him,” Blair said.
”Well actually, that is cold courage of an extraordinary sort.
”Secondly, despite everything that’s been said, there is only one way to stop a suicide bomber, which is to kill that person because anything else that happens, unless you can persuade them in some open space to undress, everything else allows the shot to go home but the bomb to go off.”
It was ”not an execution”, he insisted, adding: ”I’m devastated for that family, I’m devastated for the officers.” – Sapa-AFP