Police who tailed Brazilian didn't think he was a threat

Quoting senior police sources, it said three surveillance officers who followed Jean Charles de Menezes into a south London subway station where he died on July 22 did not feel he was armed or about to set off a bomb.

They wanted to detain the 27-year-old electrician, but were instructed to hand over the operation to a team of armed police who then shot him dead in a carriage full of horrified commuters, the newspaper said.

"There is no way those three (surveillance) guys would have been on the train carriage with him (De Menezes) if they believed he was carrying a bomb," a police source was quoted as saying.

"Nothing he did gave the surveillance team the impression that he was carrying a device."

In a similar report, the Sunday Mirror newspaper said the surveillance officer who restrained De Menezes inside the carriage was "totally shocked when the suspect was repeatedly shot while he was holding him".

The reports added to a furore over the death of De Menezes in the tense days after the July 7 bombings in the British capital in which 56 people were killed, including four apparent Islamist suicide bombers.

In an interview with the News of the World, London's police chief Ian Blair said 24 hours passed before he learned that De Menezes was innocent, after he publicly linked the incident to the ongoing anti-terrorist operation.