THE row over the shooting of an innocent Brazilian man grew yesterday after Scotland Yard sources claimed that police were boycotting the independent watchdog that is investigating the incident.

A senior police source claimed that the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has so far failed to persuade a single force to help the watchdog to discover who leaked embarrassing documents last week exposing police blunders during the incident last week.

The leaked files revealed a series of fatal errors in the shooting of de Menezes by undercover firearms officers who mistakenly believed that he was a suicide bomber.

“They can’t find anyone to do the leak inquiry for them. Nobody wants to do it,” a senior Metropolitan police official said yesterday. “You could interpret that as a show of unhappiness about the way the IPCC has behaved in this case.”

The official indicated that police chiefs across the country were united with Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police chief in anger against the IPCC and Nick Hardwick, its chairman, over the leak.

The claim drew a furious response from John Wadham, the IPCC deputy chairman. “This is complete rubbish. We made an early decision not to use a police force for the review,” he said.

The leaked file contradicted official police and witness accounts of the killing and suggested that police had tried to cover up the truth. Blair had originally said that de Menezes had acted suspiciously and refused to obey police instructions when challenged.

It emerged last night that Blair did not know his officers had shot an innocent man until 24 hours after de Menezes was killed. The commissioner first learnt the Brazilian had no connection to the attempted London transport system bombings the next day.

“Somebody came in at 10.30 [Saturday morning] and said the equivalent of ‘Houston we have a problem’,” Blair tells today’s The News of the World.

“He didn’t use those words but he said, ‘We have some difficulty here, there is a lack of connection’. I thought, ‘That’s dreadful, what are we going to do about that?’.”

The commissioner, who has been accused by critics of trying to cover up the circumstances surrounding the shooting asked the public to look at “the bigger picture”.

However, the papers, leaked to ITV News, revealed that de Menezes was behaving normally when he was confronted and did not leap a ticket barrier or act suspiciously at the Tube station. The files showed that he had been sitting down when challenged and was actually being restrained by an undercover officer when he was shot.

The feud between police chiefs and the IPCC is likely to be further fuelled by a separate police claim this weekend.

An IPCC employee, said to be an administrator, was suspended last week over the leak. Police sources suggested yesterday that a friend of the woman had applied for a job at ITV News and had offered access to the documents as an example of the sort of material that he could provide, a claim denied by a senior insider at ITV News.

The de Menezes family was reported yesterday to have said that Scotland Yard has already offered to pay £560,000 in compensation for the error.

The Met said yesterday that it has reviewed its “shoot-to-kill” policy. “The police have reviewed the strategy and we have made one or two small changes, but the operation remains essentially the same,” a spokeswoman said. o The suspected Shepherd’s Bush bomber Osman Hussain is said to have confessed to a friend two days after the July 21 bombings that he was responsible for the failed attack, the Italian court of appeal was told last week.

According to the European arrest warrant issued by Bow Street magistrates’ court, Hussain also justified suicide bombings “in the name of Allah”.

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