SCOTLAND Yard officers who ordered the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes knew that they had killed the wrong man hours before Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner was informed.

Senior detectives have told The Times that members of the Yard’s anti-terrorist branch were sure that Mr de Menezes was not a terrorist in the early hours of Saturday morning. But Sir Ian was not informed until 10.30am that day, by which time he had given a television interview praising the police team hunting the July 21 bombers for “playing out of its socks”.

“What no one knows is why nobody got him out of bed,” the detectives said. “The Commissioner should have been told right away.”

In an interview the Commissioner said he first learnt that the 27-year-old Brazilian had no connection to the attempted London transport system bombings of July 21 when a colleague told him words to the effect that: “Houston, we have a problem.” Sir Ian said that he immediately thought: “That’s dreadful, what are we going to do about that?” But lawyers for Mr de Menezes’s parents say that Sir Ian should resign after his admission that he publicly linked the the electrician with terrorism before he had all the information about what happened at Stockwell Underground station on July 22.

Further embarrassing revelations over the weekend about the Yard’s clumsy handling of the entire affair fuelled calls for a public inquiry as the de Menezes family and their supporters plan to stage a protest at Downing Street today.

Tony Blair was forced to interrupt his holiday yesterday to lead the expressions of support for the beleaguered police chief. His backing came after that of John Prescott and Charles Clarke.

The Deputy Prime Minister, reflecting the mounting unease, said: “There are matters of great concern here. I would not want you to think for a moment that I am entirely happy with the events that happened. It was a terrible tragedy that that young lad was killed.”

However, he urged everyone to wait for the Independent Police Complaints Commission to establish what happened “before jumping to conclusions”.

His plea is unlikely to stifle demands for a more searching inquiry into Sir Ian’s and the Yard’s behaviour as the independent watchdog is investigating only the shooting, and not the police conduct in the days that followed.

Gareth Peirce, the lawyer for the de Menezes family, asked why Sir Ian had told a televised press conference that Mr de Menezes was “directly linked” to the failed bomb attacks on 21/7. “We express incredulity that the senior police officer would have made extravagant claims from the outset without first informing themselves of the true facts and to have done anything else would have been negligent in the extreme”, Ms Peirce said.

Sir Ian’s critics allege that he tried to stage a cover-up. Less than an hour after Mr de Menezes had been shot, Sir Ian admitted yesterday that he had written to the Home Office and the IPCC asking for the Yard to lead the investigation.

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