“Shoot to Kill: Terror on the Tube” is a “mesmerising feat of documentary-making”, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian.
For the first time since the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005, the Metropolitan Police officer who killed him gives a “raw and detailed interview” about the events that led to the Brazilian electrician’s death.
De Menezes was on his way to repair a broken fire alarm when he was shot and killed in an underground carriage at Stockwell station. In a tragic case of mistaken identity, police wrongly suspected De Menezes as being one of the suicide bombers who took part in a failed copycat attack two weeks after the 7/7 London bombings.
The first instalment of the “gripping” two-part series is “all atmosphere”, said Nicholson, capturing the “palpable nervousness and anxiety” of Londoners in the aftermath of the attack. Commuters were already “frightened and jittery” when, just two weeks after the bombings that killed 52 people on 7/7, another four bombers attempted to detonate explosives on the underground, failing to go through with it only because their devices didn’t go off.
The Metropolitan Police officer’s “minute-by-minute” first-hand account of the events that led to the tragic mistake is “riveting”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. From the “grainy, faxed image of the real suspect” to the surveillance officers who identified De Menezes as a potential bomber, we gradually find out how it went so wrong.
Despite the then Met commissioner Cressida Dick’s instruction to stop De Menezes getting on the Tube being “woefully unclear”, the police officer avoids criticising the higher powers at the Met. And he stops short of offering an apology to the innocent man’s family. “Ultimately our sympathy should be for Mr de Menezes, killed on what should have been an ordinary journey to work.”
Perhaps the series was a little rushed in its examination of the serious errors made by the Met Police, said Nicholson in The Guardian. But it “untangles the mess made” in the aftermath of the shooting, allowing those who were there that day to “give their version of events”. It’s a “compelling” watch.