But it was "evidence" that, right from the very moment Jean Charles was shot, but they did absolutely nothing to set the record straight, but rather colluded in spreading it, and in confirming it, by a failure to speak up. (Even when the allegations were contained in reports given to the coroner, which would have been seen by the police.)

If someone hadn't blown the whistle and leaked the documents this week, none of this would have been in the public domain, or admitted to the family, for many months, quite possibly for quite a few years.

I quite agree with greg that the idea of a deliberate conspiracy to kill a random foreigner, to show willing, doesn't stand up. But there is plenty of reason to suspect the existance of a conspiracy to blur and conceal the facts about what happened.

It seems possible that one reason for that might have been some idea that revealing the truth about the catastrophic bungling in this episode couls have the effect of making people less likely to be open with the police. I mean, how confident would you feel about passing on some slight suspicion you had about a neighbour or a colleague, if you thought that some hit squad was going to leap on them in a public place and execute them without any further investigation? (Of course in some cases where that would be the intention of the informant. I somehow don't see that as too helpful to any fight against terror either.)

But the trouble with that is, there had in fact already been allegations published from the family and others which had asserted that the stories about Jean Charles leaping that barrier and wearing a heavy and suspicious jacket. The true version would have surfaced, but in a way that maximised distrust of the police.

A police force that makes mistakes is one thing - a police force that engages in a conspiracy to conceal those mistakes is something else.