Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes
From
Rhino@21:1/5 to
All on Thu May 1 17:37:46 2025
Who was Jean Charles de Menezes, you may ask, and why was he shot? He
was a Brazilian electrician working in London, England in the weeks
after the notorious bombings by Al-Qaida adherents that rocked the city
in 2005. In the aftermath of bombings, a second group of would-be
suicide bombers wanted to do a fresh series of bombings on the Tube
(subway) and on a bus but their plan went wrong because the detonating chemicals were improperly mixed. They tried to detonate their backpacks
but they failed to go off. Each of the would-be bombers escaped their respective subways and bus but one left sufficient evidence behind to be identified and located. A surveillance team and armed police set up an operation to detain him and shoot him if necessary.
That's when things went wrong. Despite any close resemblance between the
bomber and Mr. De Menezes - the bomber is black and bearded but De
Menezes is white with a bit of stubble - police start following De
Menezes. They are on great pressure not to let him get on the subway
but, due to timing issues and bad radios, De Menezes succeeds in
boarding the subway before the police get the green light to stop him.
They board the subway and several of them fire hollowpoint rounds into
him from point blank range.
I've just told you the gist of the plot for the first two of the four
episodes. Apparently, the other two episodes will be about the inquiry
into how the police messed up so badly, killing a totally innocent man.
This is a re-enactment of real events that took place in 2005. It's
quite interesting but I should warn you that the torrent I viewed has a
serious deficiency: it lacks subtitles for the scenes where De Menezes
was speaking Portuguese to coworkers or his family. Even when I found
subtitles for the series, they didn't bother to translate the Portuguese
parts. That makes those scenes very frustrating. I can only assume that
they emphasize his innocence to increase our empathy with his death. I
really don't understand why the producers didn't include subtitles for
the Portuguese scenes or even have those scenes take place in English.
Aside from this, I recommend this series if you want to get a good idea
of how the real world works in situations like this.
IMDB rates this series at 7.8.
--
Rhino
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