It seems more likely that it was just a case of a cock-up by a panic-stricken bunch of police officers.

Set in motion by a completely bungled surveillance operation - apparently the man on duty watching the flat was "relieving himself" as Jean Charles de Menezes came out of the door of the block of flats, so he never switched on his video in time, just made a call to his team saying that someone who possibly might be the man the were looking for had left the flats.

From then on it just spiralled out of control in a kind of "Chinese Whispers" process in which a possibility was turned into a suspicion and ultimately into a false but definite identification as it passed along the line. And once there was a definite identification of a known bomber as jumping onto a tube train, the rest followed logically enough, in the circumstances of the day, a day after four failed bombings on three London trains and a bus.

But the lies about police challenges and heavy jackets and leaping barriers and runnig down stairs, they weren't mistakes, and I cannot see how any kind of excuse can be made for them.