We don't normally update Londonist over the weekend, but then again these are far from normal events happening in the capital at the moment. On Friday we followed the breaking news that a man had been shot dead at Stockwell and like the rest of those following the events from a distance we simply assumed that the man killed by the police was in some way connected to either Thursday's events or the bombings from two weeks ago.
We were wrong and so were the police who have just issued a statement that the dead man was unconnected with the incidents:
We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday 21st July 2005. For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets.
We knew that the man was already under surveillance and we gave the police enough credit to assume that the man was dangerous - why else such an armed response? We were a little worried about the fact that the man seemed to have been unarmed according to eye witnesses and as we watched 'experts' do their best to reassure us that such actions were necessary if the man had had explosives we couldn't help but wonder why no statement about such devices had been released. It later emerged that the dead man had been challenged by police but failed to stop - this helped fight the unease as up until this point none of the witnesses close to the incident remembered such a warning being given.
We watched the news this morning and again assumed that the two men already detained had some connection with the dead man at Stockwell.
Now it seems he was simply an innocent man who made the mistake of running from the police. Even after the events of the last few weeks we can imagine a number of reasons that someone would run from the authorities.
We were shocked, although not entirely surprised, when London was targeted by terrorists, but we were never humbled by their actions.
That London police officers/MI5/special forces now seem to have killed an unarmed innocent man with little warning is much more shocking, terrifying and unthinkable.
We'll pick this up again on Monday when we hope more facts surrounding the tragedy will have emerged.
