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Police officer who killed Azelle Rodney had shot two others dead
Police officer who killed Azelle Rodney had shot two others dead
(about 1 hour later)
The police officer who killed Azelle Rodney had shot two other people dead during his career, an inquiry has heard.
The police officer who shot Azelle Rodney dead has told an inquiry that he opened fire fearing that Rodney was carrying a machine gun capable of firing a 1,000 rounds a minute.
Mr Rodney, 24, was shot by the officer, identified only as E7, after the car in which he was travelling was stopped by police in Edgware, north London, in April 2005.
The officer, identified only as E7, was giving evidence at the inquiry into the death of Rodney, who was killed seven years ago in north London. The inquiry also heard that E7 had previously shot dead two other people during his career.
The police team believed that he was part of an armed gang who were on their way to rob drug dealers.
Rodney was stopped on 30 April 2005 in Hale Lane, Edgware, north-west London, by armed officers acting on intelligence that he and fellow gang members were armed and on their way to rob a drugs gang.
The inquiry into Mr Rodney's death heard on Tuesday that during an incident in the 1980s E7 shot two men and injured another two. Inquests into the men's deaths later found that they had been lawfully killed, and the officer received a commendation from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for his conduct. The two injured men were later tried and jailed.
E7 told the inquiry that the officers were briefed that Rodney and his accomplices were armed, possibly with machine guns. Rodney and others travelling in a VW Golf were followed by officers who decided to force his car to stop.
An inquiry is being held into Mr Rodney's death instead of an inquest because of sensitive information that would have to be withheld from a coroner.
Three unmarked police cars boxed the Golf in and the car containing E7 pulled alongside Rodney, who was sitting in the backseat.
The hearing was told that E7 received a commander's commendation in the 1990s after an armed stand-off with a gunman in a minicab office. He said: "I could tell that his heart wasn't in it and I screamed 'armed police' at him and the man dropped the gun when I was just about to open fire."
E7 said Rodney's movements and body language, including ducking down and coming back up again, left him convinced that he had to open fire. He told the inquiry that he believed Rodney had ducked down to grab a weapon from the car floor. The officer said he could not wait or shout a warning because: "In half a second he could have nine rounds in the air." He rapidly opened fire fearing that the lives of his fellow officers were in danger.
In 2004, the Independent Police Complaints Commission recommended that he was given "words of advice" after an armed operation.
Susan Alexander, the dead man's mother, interrupted E7's evidence, saying: "How many lies are you going to tell?" She then left the inquiry chamber. E7 stopped and appeared to need to compose himself.
It was claimed that he left a police car without permission during the operation to test his radio and buy coffee. E7 said his superiors thought it was "a storm in a teacup" and did not give him advice. A man was killed during the operation but the officer was not directly involved.
Six shots were fired in total including two that hit Rodney in the head. The officer was inches from Rodney when he opened fire.
He said: "Nothing I did delayed us getting to the scene at all."
But the inquiry heard that Rodney's movements that E7 says led him to believe the suspect was going to fire might have been caused by another vehicle striking the Golf at 20mph.
The officer was arrested after a drunken brawl at a nightclub in Covent Garden, central London, in December 2000, which he admitted was "not one of my proudest moments".
E7 said he did not see a weapon in Rodney's hands before opening fire. Rodney died at the scene. Firearms were later found in the car.
"I ended up with about four or five bouncers on top of me and I ended up in a fight," he told the inquiry. "My warrant card was ripped off me and thrown away.
Sir Christopher Holland, chairing the inquiry, asked: "What could he do to avoid bring shot?"
"We all do silly things occasionally when we drink but I was old enough and wise enough to know better. It was one of those situations that got out of hand."
E7 said that the totality of the actions he perceived led him to believe Rodney had to be shot. The inquiry heard that E7 had more than two decades experience as a firearms expert and had received commendations for his bravery.
On the day Mr Rodney was killed – 30 April – E7 said he was concerned that the three men in the car might have a sub-machine gun. The VW Golf in which they were travelling was under surveillance for several hours before it was brought to a stop, and E7 opened fire within a second of pulling up beside the car.
The inquiry also heard that he had been recommended for disciplinary action once for leaving his vehicle while on duty. He had also been arrested after a fracas in a central London nightclub; he was not charged.
He said they feared the gang had "a fairly compact weapon that could fire in excess of 1,000 rounds a minute, that's 18 rounds per second".
In the 1980s, he had shot two men dead in an operation and in another had wounded two other suspects.
E7 went on: "The reality is that these people would be untrained, and actually an untrained person with a high-capacity, high-repetition sub-machine gun is more dangerous than a trained person."
The officer, who was first firearms trained in the early 1980s, tried putting a ballistic shield in the car he was using, but it blocked access to the door handle.
When asked why he had done this, he said: "I was the person that was going to be right next to someone with a sub-machine gun.
"It wasn't the first time that we had confronted dangerous people armed with that type of weaponry. This was high on the scale of danger but it was certainly no more dangerous than other operations that we'd carried out over the years."
The officer has been granted anonymity during the public inquiry, and members of the press were banned from the courtroom as he gave evidence, listening to audio feed from a separate room.
