THE AUDI car that Chris Kaba was driving was brought to a halt through ‘contact’ with marked police vehicles, after which: ‘An officer standing to the front of the Audi then fired a single shot through the windscreen, which hit Mr Kaba in the head.’
The inquest into the police killing of 24-year-old Chris Kaba in Streatham Hill on 5th September opened at Southwark Magistrates Court yesterday.
Construction worker Kaba was due to become a father when he died, he was not a suspect but was being followed by a police car without lights or sirens before he was brought to a halt through a collision and shot dead by the firearms officer, the inquest was told.
The unarmed father-to-be was killed by a single shot to the head fired by an officer referred to only as NX121, in a residential road.
In the aftermath of the killing, the Metropolitan police claimed that Kaba had been shot ‘after a vehicle pursuit’.
But the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which is investigating the shooting, made no mention of a chase in its summary of the incident, which it read to the Inner South London Coroner’s Court yesterday.
At 21:52 BST, about 15 minutes before the shooting, a pursuit began by officers in an unmarked police car with no lights or sirens.
After driving the Audi down Kirkstall Gardens, Kaba was blocked by a marked police car and there was contact between the Audi and police vehicles, the court heard.
‘An officer standing to the front of the Audi then fired a single shot through the windscreen, which hit Mr Kaba in the head.’
He was taken to hospital, but died soon after midnight on 6th September. A provisional cause of death was given as a ‘gunshot wound to the head’.
The senior coroner Andrew Harris asked if anyone had been charged with homicide. ‘Not at this time,’ he was told.
In a statement on behalf of the family, Kaba’s cousin Jefferson Bosela said: ‘Officers must be interviewed under caution immediately. We have been told that after nearly a month, neither the officer who killed Chris nor any of the other officers involved have been interviewed under caution.’
Bosela, wearing a Justice for Chris Kaba T-shirt, also called on the Crown Prosecution Service to urgently make a charging decision.
He said: ‘This should not take months and months. The evidence they need to make that decision should be available within weeks.
‘An urgent decision on criminal charges is critical for this family, and many others, to have faith in the system that is supposed to bring them justice.
‘We need answers. Not just this family, but the whole of London – the whole of the country – needs to know how something like this could occur. How can a young man, sitting in a car, unarmed, be shot in the head by police in London in 2022?’
