Uk- Police shooting prosecution dropped over secret evidence.

Police accused of acting 'above the law' after fatal shooting case against chief constable collapses because his force won't allow evidence to be heard in open court

Anthony Grainger fatally shot by police in 2012 after covert surveillance
Sir Peter Fahy was charged with Health and Safety breaches in operation
But force said some information was too sensitive to be heard in court
Judge also granted anonymity to roughly 30 officers involved in case
Lawyers for Sir Peter said he could not have fair trial without all evidence
CPS dropped case after judge ruled secret material would have to be heard

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The trial of the chief constable of Greater Manchester police over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed man has collapsed after the prosecution refused to allow secret police evidence to be heard in open court.

Sir Peter Fahy was due to stand trial at Liverpool crown court this week, almost three years after his officers shot dead Anthony Grainger in a police operation in Cheshire in March 2012.

Unusually, he was charged as “corporation sole” for Greater Manchester police (GMP), a legal status that means he is a representative of GMP but does not share criminal liability. A jury was to decide whether the police force had broken health and safety regulations while planning the intended arrest of Grainger and others.

On Friday, the Crown Prosecution Service said it had decided to discontinue the prosecution after it was ordered by a judge to disclose certain material in open court. Disclosure was necessary, the judge had said, so that Fahy could receive a fair trial.

A CPS spokesman said in a statement: “We have considered the rulings made by the judge that there is material which needs to be disclosed in open court in order for the defendant to have a fair trial. After consulting with relevant parties, we have concluded that we are unable to reveal that material for public interest reasons. We are therefore unable to proceed.”

The decision was met with anger by Grainger’s family. His cousin, Wesley Ahmed, who has staged a series of protests outside GMP headquarters in Manchester over the killing as part of the Justice 4 Grainger campaign, said he was disgusted.

He said: “This is a complete and utter whitewash. This decision will have a knock-on effect for the inquest, because presumably they will argue there that this crucial evidence – which I believe relates to a police informant working on Operation Shire, which killed Anthony – cannot be heard in public. I’m pretty disgusted with this, really.”

Fahy’s lawyers had been asking the judge to “stay” or throw out the case.

The hearing before Mr Justice William Davis began on Tuesday but press and public were excluded from the court for much of the time by order of the judge.

Davis also ordered that the names of around 30 officers must not be made public.

The police officer who fired the fatal shot has not been prosecuted. The health and safety case was the only criminal proceeding arising from Grainger’s death.

It was alleged that Fahy, as an employer, “failed to conduct his undertaking in such a way as to ensure as far as reasonably practicable” that the planning for “the police action leading to the intended arrest” of Grainger did not expose him to a health or safety risk.

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Grainger, a father of two, was shot dead by a police marksman as he sat in a stolen car in Culcheth, Cheshire, in March 2012. Police believe he and two accomplices were planning to rob a Sainsbury’s store nearby. Grainger was unarmed and there were no weapons in the car.

The CPS has decided the marksman should not face charges of murder or manslaughter because a jury would be likely to accept that he believed his actions were necessary.

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An unarmed man shot dead by a police marksman as he sat in a car was wrongly suspected only weeks before of stealing a computer memory stick containing the names of 1,075 police informants.
The missing stick was stolen after a detective had taken it home. It held a mass of highly confidential data about police inquiries into drug trafficking – plus hundreds of real names and addresses of secret contacts who gave information about gangsters to police.
Father-of-two Anthony Grainger was questioned about the theft but formally cleared four months later. Meanwhile, the loss of the stick was exposing the informants to grave potential danger.

It is believed at least one of those contacts was attacked and beaten at his home. Soon after that incident, Grainger, 36, was shot dead by Greater Manchester Police officers as he sat in the parked vehicle with two friends on March 3 last year.
Police records of the incident reveal he was shot at close range through the lungs and heart during a night-time operation which involved marksmen armed with sub-machine guns, pistols, Tasers and tear gas.

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The memory stick theft took place from a detective’s home in the Grotton area of Oldham in July 2011.
Ten months earlier, a similar stick containing sensitive Greater Manchester Police data had also gone missing. This prompted David Smith, the Deputy Information Commissioner responsible for policing and security issues, to make a formal recommendation that all such sticks should be encrypted.
But the second stolen stick, which was inside an officer’s wallet in his kitchen near an open back door, was not encrypted nor protected by a password.
Mr Smith described this as a ‘significant failing’.
He added: ‘The consequences of this type of breach really do send a shiver down the spine.’
As well as the names of informants, the stick contained details of police operations, names of officers involved in them, and those being targeted for arrest. The Information Commissioner’s Office has since fined the force £120,000.

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Police made the link between the stick and Grainger the month after it was stolen, when he put some Volkswagen Golf airbags up for sale on eBay. Grainger was working for his friend, Colin Waters, 42, who owned a car-breaking and spare parts business in Bury.
Why did the police think this significant? Because along with the memory stick, the officer from Grotton had lost the keys to his Golf. This was also stolen and not recovered.
Grainger had no convictions for violence, but he did have a record for car crimes, although he had committed all but one of them more than a decade earlier.
On September 29, Grainger and Waters were arrested and questioned about the memory stick at Chadderton police station.
Mr Waters said yesterday: ‘Anthony was a good friend. He lived in my house from 2009 until a short while before he was shot. We used to buy and sell parts all the time, and he put a lot of them up on eBay.
‘When the police interviewed us, all they wanted to know about was the memory stick. They claimed the airbags were from the same model as the VW stolen from the officer. But that proved nothing. We knew nothing about that stick, and we never had it.’
Police seized computers, cash and mobile phones, and released Grainger and Waters on bail. Then, on January 6, 2012, they told them there would be no further action.
In fact, the police were about to launch Operation Shire. Ostensibly, this was directed at three men – Grainger and two associates, David Totton and Robert Rimmer – and was based on suspicions they were planning to commit armed robberies. Documents show the undercover surveillance was intense, and covered every detail of the three men’s lives. For example, on the evening of February 20, Detective Constable John Mills wrote how he covertly observed Mr Rimmer when, ‘together with a white female dressed in black’, he entered a Jamie’s Italian restaurant.
In none of the dozens of Operation Shire records obtained by this newspaper is there even a hint that the men had access to weapons.
The evidence they were planning robberies also amounted to nothing more than the fact that they were sometimes seen in places where there were commercial premises, such as supermarkets and banks.
However, the briefing given by an unnamed detective from Operation Shire to 16 officers from the Greater Manchester Tactical Firearms Unit who reported for duty at 4.30am on March 3 last year, reflected none of this uncertainty.
The armed officers made their statements five days later. They are not named, but are identified by their ‘deployment numbers’.

The fullest account of the briefing is in the statement by ‘Q9’, who describes himself as a ‘close-quarter combat live fire instructor’ – one of the unit’s most senior members and ‘a veteran of many deployments’. Before the briefing, his statement says, he drew his Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun and a 30-round magazine from the armoury, together with a self-loading Glock 17 pistol, more ammunition and a Taser.
Then, it goes on, he and his colleagues were told what to expect from Grainger and his associates:
‘The intelligence suggested that the subjects were responsible for a robbery in Preston in 2008 where they broke into a bank and lay in wait for the staff.
‘When the staff arrived they held them at gunpoint .  .  . and stole a substantial amount of cash.’
Q9’s statement adds: ‘It was within my knowledge that this group of offenders were in some way linked to a robbery at a bank in Bolton where one offender had opened fire on an attending police patrol.’
No evidence has been disclosed to support either of these assertions, and none of the men has ever been charged with these crimes.
But Q9 said that in his mind: ‘I was facing extremely dangerous criminals who committed robberies whilst armed with firearms.
‘I believed that members of this organised crime gang had discharged firearms towards police in the past in order to evade arrest.’

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