Leaked documents from the official inquiry have shed new light on how Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by plain clothes officers at Stockwell Tube station in South London. According to the leaked reports, this was the sequence of events:

Friday July 22

Early: police monitor a flat in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill, South London, which they believed is linked to the previous day’s failed bomb attempts on London transport

9.30am: Officers see de Menezes walking to a bus stop and boarding a bus heading to Stockwell Tube station. He is wearing a light denim jacket and not the heavily padded coat capable of hiding an explosives belt that was initially claimed

A surveillance officer at Tulse Hill checks the photographs of the terror suspects and decides "it would be worth someone else having a look" to see if Mr de Menezes matches them. He himself has missed Mr de Menezes's departure as "I was in the process of relieving myself", and was thus unable to transmit his observations and turn on his video camera

Officers assume that de Menezes's "description and demeanour" match one of the terror suspects.

During the course of his journey: officers pass on information to Gold Command, their operations centre, that he matches the description of one of two terror suspects, including Hussain Osman, the alleged Shepherd’s Bush bomber.

Gold Command instructs them to stop de Menezes from getting on the Tube. It changes the status of the operation to "code red tactic" - from mere surveillance to an armed operation - and hands over control to CO19, the specialist firearms unit.

10am: CCTV footage shows de Menezes entering the station at a normal walking pace, picking up a free Metro newspaper, and slowly descending on an escalator. This conflicts with early accounts which described him vaulting over the barriers to the tube station, running to a Tube train and tripping over before being shot

Hearing a train pulling in, he runs across the concourse, gets into the train and sits down on the first available seat. Witnesses say that he boards through the middle doors before pausing, looking left and right, then sitting down in either the second or third seat facing the platform

At that point, armed officers were "provided with positive identification", the document says.

The officers start to shout, including the word "police". De Menezes got up and advanced towards the CO19 officers, according to one surveillance officer.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Tree stump 'shows image of Virgin Mary'
• BBC drops Strictly judge for younger model
• Trafalgar Square 'reduced to a spectacle'