On July 20, 2005, I chaired a meeting at New Scotland Yard to discuss operational tactics after the 7/7 bombings. That meeting endorsed Operation Kratos as our policy for dealing with suspected suicide bombers.

Two days later that strategy led to the fatal shooting by police of an innocent man.

Kratos has been condemned during the inquest – as it was after the Met was convicted of failing to protect the public under health and safety laws last year. It has now been renamed but remains essentially the same strategy.

The inquest that finished yesterday is the sixth time that the events of that morning in July 2005 have been pored over in intricate detail. But nothing has emerged that offers a realistic alternative for dealing with suicide terrorists.

Kratos was designed primarily to deal with a situation in which a suicide bomber, believed to be at the point of detonating a bomb, needs to be neutralised to save life.

Although gruesome to imagine, that has to involve a fatal shot to the brain stem. An injured suspect might still be able to detonate a device. I cannot imagine how else those officers, on that day, in those circumstances, could have dealt with the scenario that they believed they were in.

After the 7/7 attacks, police were responding to reports of suspected suicide bombers at a rate of at least four or five a day. I recall one very close shave when we reacted to reports of a cyclist behaving suspiciously in Parliament Square. Undercover officers and armed police were deployed and had Kratos as a tactical option. The man’s behaviour was observed and the officers concluded that he posed no threat. He would have been wholly unaware that he was under observation.

We ask our armed police and commanders to make split-second decisions and we don’t want them to blink at the critical time. Their track record is admirable, with only a very small number of mistaken shootings. Compare that with other parts of the world.

None of these facts, however, offers a solution to the present dilemma. Terrorists will be looking at how the police respond to the inquest verdict. They will exploit any weakness or loss of confidence.

It was a tragedy that Jean Charles lost his life, but no officer went to work that day to kill an innocent man. The circumstances led to the mistake, not the strategy. This is a plan without a “get out” clause – its aim is to kill to save life.

Policymakers will introduce changes but if we want the police to protect us from suicide bombers, they must have the option of shooting to kill.

Andy Hayman is former Assistant Commissioner Special Operations in the Metropolitan Police

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