A surveillance officer who was tailing Jean Charles de Menezes said today that his team made no identification of the Brazilian as a suspect before he was shot by police.

The officer, known as Ken, told an inquest that he tried and failed several times to get clear sight of the man’s face before he boarded a bus to Stockwell Underground station.

Despite this his team leader was asked by the police control room to give a “percentage” of how likely it was that the man they were tailing was the suspect suicide bomber police believed him to be.

Ken said: “I believe he said that it was impossible to do that but ‘for what it’s worth I think it’s him'."

Once Mr de Menezes arrived at the Underground station Ken tried again to see his face and told the jury that he got a view of the man’s right-hand side for one or two seconds.

He followed him into the Tube station, down the escalators and onto a train. He described how he motioned to Mr de Menezes to a team of armed officers who then entered the train.

But he told the jury “there was no identification from grey team [the surveillance team] at any time.”

The inquest had heard earlier from the firearms officer who shot Mr de Menezes that a surveillance officer positively identified the young man as failed suicide bomber Hussain Osman.

The officer, using the codename C2, told the court: “I heard them say ‘this is definitely our man'."

Ken also told the court that armed officers shouted a warning of “armed police” loud enough for Mr de Menezes to have heard before he was shot.

He said that the firearms team were not inside the train carriage when they gave the warning but were coming through the open doors.

The court had earlier heard from commuters who were sharing the carriage with the shot man that they heard no warning from plain-clothes officers before the shots were fired.

Michael Mansfield, QC, who is representing Mr de Menezes’s family, said that Ken might have guessed that the reason the team was being asked to give “a percentage” on the likelihood of Mr de Menezes being the suspect was “in order to assess whether to send in SO19”.

He said: “Was anything said to the effect of ‘this is definitely our man’?"

“No sir,” said the witness.

The officer also agreed with Mr Mansfield that the man he had been following was not nervous or twitchy nor was he wearing unusual clothing.

But Ken did tell the court that as Mr de Menezes leapt from his seat in the Tube carriage as armed officers closed in on him he appeared to do so in an “unusual” manner.

The witness said that the 27-year-old was holding his hands out in front of him at the level of his torso instead of using his arms to push out of the seat.

Mr Mansfield later asked if Ken’s account of events was coloured by the knowledge that an innocent man had died.

He said: “Has your account been influenced by the fact that you more or less ushered firearms officers towards a target who turned out to be innocent and you have to justify that.”

Ken denied that his version of events had been influenced at all by anybody else and he said: “I wrote my account as best I remembered it.”

The inquest continues.

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