In Britain, we are not short of stories of police incompetence, malfeasance or deception, but the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes stands out because the manner of his death is so shocking. De Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian working as an electrician in London, boarded the tube at Stockwell station on the morning of 22 July 2005. Moments later, before the carriage doors could close, armed police sprinted on to the train and shot him seven times, point blank, in the head. De Menezes had been mistaken for a suicide bomber; he was entirely innocent of any crime.
Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a four-part drama by Jeff Pope, portrays the horror of that moment with breathtaking clarity. The sheer power and speed of the killing are viscerally startling: De Menezes (Edison Alcaide) is tackled, pinned and shot before he can utter a word in protest. Something has gone profoundly, unimaginably wrong, and Suspect is an enraging picture of what went wrong and how.
