Police shot unarmed man in drugs rip-off case

An unarmed man was shot dead by a Metropolitan Police officer who opened fire less than a second after pulling up alongside his car, an inquiry in Britain has heard.

Azelle Rodney, 24, was shot six times by the officer, known only as E7, as he sat in the back of a Volkswagen Golf after it was forced to stop in Edgware, north London, by three unmarked police cars on April 30, 2005.

The armed officers were acting on intelligence initially obtained by Customs and Excise - then responsible for drug investigations - and believed the car's three occupants were about to "rip off" a Colombian drug cartel using machine-guns.

On the first day of the public inquiry in the High Court in central London into Rodney's death, the chronology of events, intelligence logs and unanswered questions was laid out.

Ashley Underwood, QC, counsel to the inquiry, told chairman Sir Christopher Holland: "To reach your conclusions you may have to choose between conflicting accounts. To do that, you may have to decide whether the contradictions are innocent or not."

The inquiry heard how Customs and Excise believed an associate of the Colombians was planning a "rip-off" with a group of men using machine-guns - and alerted the Met on April 5, 2005.

That time it did not happen, but the same intelligence reappeared three weeks later. Operation Tayport was convened and triggered 48 hours of rapid intelligence gathering and surveillance in an attempt to identify where the armed robbery would take place and who would carry it out.

The court was shown video footage of the car chase, filmed by an officer in a following car. It ended with three police cars boxing in the Golf and E7 opening fire into the right-hand side passenger window.

The inquiry also saw a partial reconstruction which showed what E7 would have seen as he fired, and the likely trajectory of the six bullets that hit Rodney in the chest, neck and face.

Three guns were found in the Golf - one was deactivated, a second was not cocked and had its safety catch on, and the third was loaded with the safety catch off in a rucksack. There were no automatic weapons.

Rodney was wanted by police in connection with an alleged serious assault in 2004. One of the key questions to be examined is why, despite being known to the Met, he was not identified and arrested earlier.

- Independent