The British police should learn something from the Pakistani police to avoid tragedies like the one at the Stockwell station of London in late July, in which an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot dead.
In case of security emergencies, the Pakistani police sets up check posts at all key points in the city, besides patrolling in sensitive areas. If a suspect is noticed, all check posts and patrolling policemen in the surrounding area are alerted and given his description and location. While he is followed discretely from behind, the focus is on facing him from the front. The police can then easily stop him and, if he tries to escape, shoot him.
If there were armed policemen outside the Stockwell station, they could, on getting the alert, stop Menezes and order him to lie on the ground, with face down. If he refused, they could shoot him in the legs to immobilize him. Even if he was a bomber and blew himself up, he could not have harmed the policemen, who would have been at a safe distance. The people around him would have also saved themselves by taking cover immediately.
Even inside the Stockwell station, the policemen could have stopped Menezes. Declaring it as a security precaution, they could have blocked the entry to the station and asked all passengers to form a line. As the passengers entered one by one, the man could have been arrested easily. Of course, there could have been casualties if he was really a suicide bomber. But then he could have caused casualties also by blowing himself up at any moment after he saw the policemen chasing him, even seconds before he was shot.
Yet another simple technique would have prevented at least three bombers from escaping on July 21. As soon as the incidents occurred in the trains, the police could have blocked immediately the exits of Underground stations and ask all passengers to form a line and go out one by one. The police could then ask all suspects to move aside for questioning. That would have made it easy to identify and arrest the bombers. Searching for them all over the place after they had fled through the wide open exits of the Tube stations was, as we say in Urdu, like beating its path after the snake was gone.
