I’m sure most of you have heard about the craziness that happened in London again yesterday, and I am truly thankful that no civilians were hurt. However, I read something on the BBC News site this morning that has me absolutely dumbfounded.
Apparently, the British police shot dead one of the suspected perpetrators yesterday after he tried to flee the scene. I understand the general idea: if you’re running from a scene where there were explosions and fail to stop when the police tell you to, you are likely to get shot since there is the possibility of you having explosives strapped to yourself. Also, you couldn’t expect the police to shoot at your torso since that’s the most likely place where these explosives can be.
It’s the details of this story that have me confounded. An eye-witness, one Mr. Whitby, told the BBC News, “I was sitting on the train reading my paper. I heard a load of noise, people saying, ‘Get out, get down!’ I saw an Asian guy [read: Middle Eastern] run onto the train hotly pursued by three plain-clothes police officers. One of them was carrying a black handgun – it looked like an automatic – they pushed him to the floor, bundled on top of him and unloaded five shots into him.”
What what? The British police caught up with the guy, pushed him to the floor, then shot him five times?! The BBC is also saying they believe the police shot this man in the head, so as to avoid shooting any potential explosives. Also according to them, the police are trained to shoot to kill if they think someone is being a threat, which does make perfect sense. But one has to ask: is a man who is restrained on the floor by multiple officers a threat? If they were still threatened by this man, which could be understandable given he might have had explosives strapped on to him, why did they not knock him out, use mace, shot him in an extremity like the foot, or even use a taser to subdue him? Why shoot five times at close range?
By doing what they did, the police not only killed a man, they killed a potential witness — someone who could have given them reams of information as to who is behind all this and if there was a connection with the attacks of two weeks previously.
Maybe all this can be explained somehow. The eye-witness could be mistaken, the suspect could have said or done something to prompt the officers into action, or the officers could even have been given explicit instructions that would make this event come about in such a manner as it did. But right now, just by having the information that I do from the news sites, I am very, very confused.