Police dog that took part in Queen Elizabeth II's funeral dies after car crash
PD Bert, a five-year-old springer spaniel that worked for Cleveland Police, was one of two dogs in a canine support unit vehicle when it collided with a BMW in Hartlepool on Thursday evening.
Both animals were taken to a vet, but due to the severity of his injuries, PD Bert was put to sleep.
The other dog was unharmed and the police officer suffered minor injuries.
A 33-year-old man was arrested at the scene and later charged with drink driving.
He has since been bailed and is due to appear at Teesside Magistrates Court on 1 August.
PD Bert had been a serving police dog for three and a half years, Cleveland Police said.
During this time he located £250,000 in cash during a single search.
In 2022, he was deployed to London to assist with the funeral of the late Queen, which at the time was the largest ever ceremonial police operation, according to the National Police Chiefs Council.
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The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
I used to believe in the American dream. Then the police killed my son
Kelly Ghaisar never thought to teach her son, Bijan, to fear the police. She didn't see the need. After arriving in the US as a young girl fleeing the Iranian revolution in 1979, she had led a charmed life in her adopted country, building a prosperous and happy family with her husband and raising her two children – Bijan and his older sister, Nageen – to believe in the American dream. 'We had just lived our life in this bubble, this very lovely bubble,' she says. 'Even though we're both from Iran, we never felt we had to teach our kids that they were different. They were American and we taught them to believe that they were equal and free, the values we thought this country stood for. I never thought that Bijan, a young man of colour, would need to know what to do if he encountered the police. We taught him they were there to protect him, not that he would ever have to protect himself from them.' Now, she says, she knows better. 'But of course, it's too late.' Over the years, the details of Bijan's death have been told again and again: in court documents, newspaper articles and TV news broadcasts. Online, there are dozens of photos of Kelly, standing on courthouse steps surrounded by family members holding pictures of her son. Yet every time she recounts the details of the night he was killed, she tells it as if she were there, right next to him, watching helplessly as the final, tragic chapter of his young life played out. On Friday 17 November 2017, 25-year-old Bijan, who worked in his father's accounting firm, was in his Jeep Grand Cherokee driving along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in northern Virginia, just across the river from Washington DC, when he was rear-ended by an Uber driver. After the accident, Bijan didn't stop – Kelly doesn't know why – and the passenger inside the Uber called 911 to report the incident and said that Bijan had fled the scene. The 911 dispatcher put out a call identifying his vehicle and he was spotted by Lucas Vinyard and Alejandro Amaya, two DC park police (a federal law enforcement agency) officers, who started a pursuit. They were joined by a police car from Fairfax county, Virginia, which recorded what followed. The park police officers pulled Bijan's car over, got out of their vehicle and approached him, their guns raised and pointing into his car. Kelly thinks that Bijan panicked. 'Before he was killed, he had never been in trouble, had never even had a speeding ticket,' she says. 'And suddenly he was in this very frightening situation and he was very, very afraid of guns. He had an almost pathological fear of them. I know my child and I know he would have been terrified.' In the video footage of the encounter, which Fairfax county police released a few months after Bijan's death, you can see Bijan's Jeep driving away and then stopping a second time and Amaya running to the vehicle with his gun drawn, banging it against the window. Bijan drives off again and there is a short chase before he pulls over again and the park police stop in front of his Jeep. As Bijan's car rolls slowly forward, Amaya jumps out of his car with his gun unholstered and fires repeatedly through the windshield. Bijan's car begins to roll into a ditch as Amaya is joined by Vinyard and then they shoot into the car again. After the car stops, Amaya reholsters his gun, before pulling his weapon out again and firing through the windshield. 'They just kept firing,' says Kelly quietly. 'They shot my son, who was unarmed, 10 times in the head at close range. The whole incident from start to finish took less than 10 minutes.' Across town, Kelly and her husband, James, were at home with no idea that their lives as they had known them had come to an end. 'Everything was great, the kids were great, it was all perfect,' she says. 'I was an interior designer, James was an accountant, we had a beautiful home.' That night, 'the whole thing fell apart.' At 1am two park police officers knocked on the front door. From the very first interaction, Kelly knew things were wrong. They told the couple that there had been a shootout and Bijan was in the hospital. 'Like some gangster thing happened,' says Kelly. 'And I said: 'A shootout? That's not possible.' Because Bijan was so anti-gun, he would never have had a gun in his car. So from those very first moments they were lying to us.' The officers gave the Ghaisars their card and told them to call them when they got to the hospital. 'And we never saw them again,' says Kelly. 'They never, ever picked up the phone when we tried to call.' When they arrived at the hospital, they were told that Bijan was in a coma, hovering between life and death. 'I said: 'I want to see my son.' And the doctor said: 'I'm sorry, you can't,'' says Kelly. The hospital staff told them they had received an email from the park police saying nobody should be let into Bijan's room. 'We were all so shocked. The hospital said it had never happened before. Nobody in the police told us what had happened to our child but they had armed officers guarding his body.' Kelly says: '100% there was racism there, all the way through. It just felt like: 'He's this Middle Eastern guy, we shot him, end of story. You don't have the same rights as everybody else.'' Kelly and her husband and daughter stayed at the hospital, sleeping on air beds in a waiting room for the 10 days it took Bijan to die. During that time they were only allowed to see their son once an hour for a few minutes at a time and they were never allowed to hold him. 'He was in a coma but they said that he was evidence and we couldn't touch him.' Photos of Bijan published after his death show a relaxed young man, grinning into the camera. 'He was a special person,' says Kelly, with maternal pride. 'Everybody thought so. He had this huge heart, was so considerate and generous and so handsome. His whole life was ahead of him.' Her last memories of her son are of 'his beautiful face just completely destroyed. When they took off the bandages, they had shot off one of his ears, his nose was severed, his eyes were swollen. He was unrecognisable.' With everything that has happened since, Kelly says what seemed at the time like pointless cruelty now makes sense. 'They wanted us to suffer,' she says. 'They wanted us to be scared. They wanted us to know their power.' Switching off Bijan's life support was 'the hardest decision that I will ever make in my life, even though we knew that there was nothing we could do to bring him back, that he was never going to recover,' she says. 'But I did not want my son, whatever was left of him, to be in the grip of these people. They weren't allowed to be near him any more.' Bijan's death was, Kelly says, 'not just a loss. It was an absolute catastrophe. An obliteration.' The family lost more than their son that day: 'We lost our faith in our country, our government. We saw that nothing, absolutely nothing we had believed about our country was true. That the system we thought was there to protect us was now going to fight us to protect their own people and we would be the only ones calling for justice for Bijan.' In the seven and a half years since Bijan's death, Kelly and her family have relentlessly fought the US government for accountability. She says that at every turn it has been denied. 'When you are fighting the federal government and they close ranks, there is nowhere to go,' she says. 'The park police are federal police. The FBI is a federal department. The courts are there to protect the federal government. There is no way to get justice if the justice department is against you.' The family spent two years waiting for an FBI investigation into Bijan's shooting before the justice department announced it would not file federal charges against the two officers. For 16 months, Kelly says, the park police refused to identify the officers who shot Bijan or release any information about the case until the Ghaisars filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in 2018. When Amaya and Vinyard eventually took the stand, they said they shot Bijan in self-defence. In 2023 the civil suit was settled for $5m. The Ghaisars' long fight has not been without flares of hope. In 2020 a Fairfax grand jury indicted Vinyard and Amaya for manslaughter, which Kelly says 'felt like a turning point'. Then, in October 2021, a federal judge dismissed all criminal charges against the officers on the basis of qualified immunity laws, which protect government workers from prosecution for actions taken within their official capacity if it can't be proved that they violated constitutional or statutory rights or acted with 'malicious intent'. 'The judge said that these two men were fine police officers and what they did was 'necessary and proper',' says Kelly. 'This is how our system works, that a judge can write these words about the killing of an unarmed 25-year-old man. That it was necessary and proper.' Amaya and Vinyard were put on paid leave after Bijan's death. In January this year, in a huge blow to the Ghaisar family, they went back to work at the park police. 'Which didn't surprise me but did disgust us all,' says Kelly. She says she will never accept that this is the end. 'I will not stop fighting for Bijan, not while I still live and breathe.' In 2018 the family started the Bijan Ghaisar Foundation to support organisations fighting gun violence and police brutality, and to lobby for stricter gun protection laws. In particular, Kelly has become an impassioned campaigner against qualified immunity. 'This is my number one goal, my life mission,' she says. 'I'm not naive any more – I know this probably won't happen in my lifetime – but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop for a second.' Although Bijan's photos are still all over their house and Kelly visits his grave every day, the old family traditions – the movie nights, the identical festive pyjama sets – have gone. 'When my daughter and son-in-law are around for the holidays, we all sit down, get out our laptops and strategise the next steps for our foundation,' she says. 'This is what we do together now.' She is no longer the same person, she says. 'The person I was before Bijan was killed has completely gone. She is gone. When you bring a life into the world and nurture that life and watch it grow into something as special as our son was, to see it just taken away so thoughtlessly, so pointlessly – it could have broken me for good. But I've found a fire and a strength within me that I never thought was there, and that is down to Bijan and my love for him.' She has survived thanks to her friends, her family and her activism. 'But number one is Bijan. He is the force holding me up, giving me strength and light and love to do what I'm trying to do.' People ask her how she hasn't been corroded away by bitterness, grief or rage. 'And I say: Bijan would not want that. Any negative energy was wrong to him, so I'm just channelling his spirit every day, and every day I get stronger. Because this is what Bijan would want me to do. Never give up.' Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I have to forgive': 20 years after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot by police in Stockwell his cousin looks back
Patricia da Silva Armani was living with her cousin Jean Charles de Menezes in a flat in south London two decades ago when he was shot seven times in the head by firearms officers at Stockwell station. Her younger cousin was a chatterbox and a dreamer, she says, 'always with plans'. The pair had grown up together as part of a large and close family. Two years after De Menezes had moved to London for a life that Brazil was unable to offer, 'Paty', as he affectionately called her, had been encouraged to follow him to his two-bedroom flat on Scotia Road, along with their younger cousin Vivian Figueiredo, then 20. De Menezes, 27, intended to work another six months as an electrician in London before returning home to Brazil to rejoin his girlfriend, Adriana, she says. They had talked it over during what would turn out to be their final hours with each other in the home they shared. 'I love you,' De Menezes had said as he gave Da Silva Armani, then 31, a hug before leaving her side for the last time to go to work. Within 48 hours, De Menezes, on the way to a job in Kilburn, was lying dead on a tube carriage floor. Police officers had mistaken him for Hussain Osman, one of the four men who attempted to blow themselves up on London trains and a bus the previous day in a failed copycat of the 7/7 bombings that had killed 52 people and left hundreds more wounded two weeks earlier. Da Silva Armani collapsed as she identified her cousin in the police morgue on 23 July. But she became a key player in the campaign for justice after compelling evidence of catastrophic police errors and New Scotland Yard's dissemination of misinformation emerged via leaks to the press. More would come out in two damning Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) reports, the Met's trial and conviction under health and safety laws, and the formal inquest into the killing in 2008. It was in Da Silva Armani's name that the campaign then vainly sought to challenge the Crown Prosecution Service at the European court of human rights after a decision was made not to charge any officers over the killing. It is evidently then with some trepidation that she answers the question as to whether she still believes the firearms officers, whose claims that they shouted a warning of 'armed police' was not believed by the jury at the inquest, should have been prosecuted. 'You may be surprised by my answer: no, absolutely not,' she says. 'Because the whole situation led them to this. I take many years to get this conclusion. Many, many years. It's not easy. You are the first person I said it [to]. 'The big mistake was in the communications and surveillance and that they allowed Jean to go into the station. When Jean was allowed to go down the escalator at Stockwell station he was already dead. The shooters had no choice, no choice.' It is not a position that everyone remembering De Menezes at Stockwell station at 10.05am – the time of his death – on Tuesday will back. It has taken a lot of tears and reflection to get to this moment, she says. She certainly believes that those at the top of the Met then – namely the late commissioner Ian Blair, made Lord Blair of Boughton in 2010, and Cressida Dick, who was running the operation on 22 July 2005 and who rose to lead the Met in 2017 – acted shamefully and should have been held to account for their failings. De Menezes had only been followed by surveillance officers from the flat on 17 Scotia Road that fateful day as a result of Osman having put down number 21 as his address when registering at a gym – the flats shared a communal entrance. Osman's membership card had been found in the detritus left when his homemade bomb failed at Shepherd's Bush tube station. There was only one officer in the van outside the property. He was urinating into a plastic container as De Menezes left and had been unable to get an image or a proper look. Dick then decided not to suspend the bus services for fear of alerting the terrorists to their watch. De Menezes got on a bus, got off at Brixton and then got back on when he realised that the tube station was shut. It was wrongly interpreted as possible anti-surveillance measure. Dick would claim that she was led by the surveillance team to believe it was likely to be Osman, who was later arrested in Rome, that they were following. There was a far greater level of doubt than that among the surveillance team. She wanted the firearms team to stop him before he got to the tube station but they were not yet in position to intervene. The armed officers arrived around two minutes after De Menezes at Stockwell. Some accounts had Dick telling her subordinates to stop the suspect from getting on the tube 'at all costs'. She denied that language. But the officers running into the tube station said they fully believed that the man they were engaging was a terrorist about to blow himself up. The two shooters, C2 and C12, claimed in their formal statements that they had shouted 'armed police' to De Menezes as they rushed at him and that he had risen from his seat towards them. None of the 17 members of the public on the carriage heard any such warning. The jury at the inquest later said they did not believe the officer's testimony and returned an open verdict after being prohibited by the coroner from an unlawful killing verdict. The operational failures were followed by false claims from Blair and his press office that De Menezes had failed to respond to a police challenge and had been wearing suspiciously bulky clothing. It took a leak from a secretary at the IPCC to ITN's News at Ten to reveal this as a falsehood. Despite all this, when giving evidence at the inquest, Dick would not countenance suggestions from Michael Mansfield QC, representing De Menezes' family, that errors had been made. Her only concession: 'In any operation some things that in an ideal world would happen, don't happen.' Da Silva Armani says that the 'arrogance' of the two senior officers is what remains with her today. She has learned more recently that the JusticeforJean campaign's meetings were infiltrated by undercover officers for purposes unknown. She will give evidence at the public inquiry into the so-called Spycops scandal. And yet, she says, she will not give into hate. Blair passed away earlier this month. 'I felt nothing, it was strange'. One of the officers, C12, spoke for the first time earlier this year for a Channel 4 documentary. 'Everything told me I was going to die and that is why I acted like I did,' he told the programme. Da Silva Armani says she 'saw sadness in his eyes', as she struggles to hold back her own tears. She could not watch the whole interview and felt only pity. 'I have to forgive him,' she says. A few weeks ago, her 10-year-old daughter had held back from joining her classmates having their photographs taken with the police officers at the school summer fair in south Croydon. 'Because of our cousin', the young girl had told her concerned mum. 'I said to her: 'Listen to me, what happened with your cousin is an isolated case,'' said Da Silva Armani. 'The police is good. The police is here for our protection, to serve us' … We should not generate hate.' Her daughter joined her friends.
BBC News
39 minutes ago
- BBC News
Targets of new people smuggling sanctions to be announced
Gang leaders, corrupt officials and companies selling small boat equipment will be named this week as the first targets of new government sanctions against financial action - which the government says is a world-first - is aimed at tackling illegal immigration to the UK and is central to Sir Keir Starmer's plan to disrupt the English Channel crossings by "smashing the gangs" that are organising sanctions strategy was first unveiled in January but the government has now indicated that it is ready to announce on Wednesday the dozens of people who will have their assets frozen, and will be banned from entering the UK and engaging with its financial Secretary David Lammy said: "For too long, criminal gangs have been lining their corrupt pockets and preying on the hopes of vulnerable people with impunity as they drive irregular migration to the UK." People targeted by the sanctions include those who supply fake documents and finance small boats, as well as "middlemen" who push money through Hawala networks, an informal system for organising money transfers often used by Minister Sir Keir Starmer is under growing pressure to stem the flow of migrants reaching the UK, after pledging to "smash" people-smuggling gangs ever since the general election campaign a year this month, he signed a "one in, one out" deal with France to return migrants to France for the equivalent number of legal asylum seekers, subject to security checks. In the first six months of this year, more than 20,000 people crossed in small boats, an increase of nearly 50% on the previous year, according to Home Office Monday, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the number of people entering the UK illegally was causing a "public safety crisis" for women and girls."The truth is you don't stop the Channel crossings by freezing a few bank accounts in Baghdad or slapping a travel ban on a dinghy dealer in Damascus," Philp said in a on Monday, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said that people protesting outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers in Essex were "genuinely concerned families". Bottles and flares were thrown towards police during the demonstration, which Downing Street condemned."I don't think anybody in London even understands just how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale in this country," Farage said in a speech on Monday. The government says that the new sanctions will target immigration crime gangs "where traditional law enforcement and criminal justice approaches cannot reach". Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the new sanctions regime is a "decisive step in our fight against the criminal gangs who profit from human misery"."It will allow us to target the assets and operations of people-smugglers wherever they operate, cutting off their funding and dismantling their networks piece by piece," she said.
