For many people this morning's shooting at Stockwell Tube must have sounded like a scene from a Hollywood movie: a man chased down a subway escalator by armed police, cornered in a train and shot five times at close range.

For Michael Winner, the film director who sent Charles Bronson out to clean up the streets of New York 30 years ago in Death Wish, it was a sign that Britain is finally coming to terms with the challenge of terrorism.

Terrorism experts said that the South London shooting was an unavoidable use of lethal force, the first result of new rules of engagement given to the security forces to deal with the threat of suicide bombers: shoot for the head, not for the body, in case you detonate explosives on the suspect's body. If officers thought the man was carrying explosives, they had no choice.

Mr Winner, chairman of the Police Memorial Trust, went further than that. He told Times Online: "I think the police shooting the terrorist was absolutely right.

"Our whole approach to terrorism is absurd. We need new laws to detain people without trial - we are at war. We are playing cricket and they're playing mass murder. Police powers should be massively increased, as well as police numbers."

Mr Winner's comments will earn him no thanks from the Metropolitan Police, whose Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was at pains today to say that "any death is deeply regrettable". Since the suicide bombings of July 7, Sir Ian has done all he can to stop the terror attacks dividing London's ethnic and religious communities.

And the fact that the suspected suicide bomber was shot so many times also caused some disquiet today - even before the dead man was identified. The Muslim Council of Britain said it had received a number of phone calls from ordinary Muslims worried that the police had adopted a "shoot-to-kill" policy.

Inayat Bunglawala, a Council spokesman, said: "There may well be reasons why the police felt it necessary to unload five shots into the man and shoot him dead, but they need to make those reasons clear. We are getting phone calls from quite a lot of Muslims who are distressed about what may be a shoot-to-kill policy."

Mr Winner was unrepentant: "The so-called politically correct liberals have on their hands the blood of many of our citizens already. Tragically, the number will vastly increase before anything sensible is done about it."

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