‘It’s a whitewash,’ Forest Gate victim Mohammed Abdul Kahar said yesterday after the IPCC report on the 2 June 2006 police raid said it was justified and recommended no police officer be disciplined.
Kahar added: ‘They did not investigate the full 150 complaints, they’re going to do no investigation, no one’s going to get criminal prosecution. I would have liked to have seen some people prosecuted.’
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, who was shot in the chest, and his brother Abul Koyair, 20, were held for a week before being released without charge.
Kahar rejected press reports that he was shot in the shoulder and the IPCC report’s claim that the use of force was justified as the police were obliged to act on intelligence.
He added: ‘How can you justify a raid on two innocent families. Me and my brother, we’re innocent, we’re not terrorists.
‘How can they justify shooting me. I was close to getting killed. I didn’t get shot in the shoulder, I got shot in the chest, so I was very close to dying.
‘How can they justify it by saying that the intelligence was right. To me the main criminal is that person, the informant, but they’re not going to do any investigation on the informant.
‘They won’t even let us know who the informant is or what kind of “intelligence” they had.’
IPCC chief Deborah Glass said she could not call for disciplinary proceedings as police had not acted with excessive force.
Kahar reacted angrily: ‘How can you say it’s not excessive force!
‘They shot me, they repeatedly kicked me, they were trying to hit me with something, a blunt object – which I later now realise was the gun – and they dragged me down the stairs and everything – so how was that?!
‘All the action they did was not appropriate, it was more aggressive.
‘They haven’t learnt from it, which we know because in recent times there are more raids happening, the families are getting more traumatised
‘They’ve learned nothing, have they, because the IPCC has given the green light to them to go ahead – do it, whichever way you want to do it, we’ll support you – because they never prosecute any police officers, do they.’
He added that the IPCC’s recommendation for a ‘high-profile public apology’ comes ‘eight months too late and doesn’t go far enough.’
Kahar’s neighbour Hanif Doga said he was struck on the head with a gun, and added: ‘I could have died from this injury, yet the IPCC dismiss it as a minor head injury and call for no further action.’
‘I am deeply disappointed at this report, this is belittling proper investigation.’
A statement by solicitors Birnberg Pearce ‘on behalf of the residents of 46 and 48 Lansdown Road’, said: ‘It is completely clear that a crime of the utmost seriousness was committed on or before the 2nd June 2006.
‘An unnamed informant, or informants, provided entirely false information to the police, described in the IPCC report as “intelligence”, which led to the catastrophic events of the 2nd June.
‘The lives of several law abiding individuals were devastated, and the life of one of them seriously endangered as a direct result of that information.’
The statement concluded that the families ‘remain victims of unsolved criminal offences of which the report makes no mention whatsoever.’
