Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is a 2025 Disney+ TV drama about the police murder of the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician at Stockwell underground station in London in the aftermath of a failed attempt by Islamists to bomb transport in the capital on July 21, 2005.

These events followed London’s devastating July 7 suicide bombings, which left 52 people dead and more than 700 injured across the public transport network.

The gripping four-part series is a blend of dramatic reconstruction, interviews, and investigative reporting scripted by Jeff Pope, well known for his social commentary writing including the barbarism of capital punishment (Pierrepoint), the terrible treatment of unmarried pregnant girls in Ireland (Philomena) and the activities of the TV celebrity and paedophile Jimmy Savile (The Reckoning).

The drama is made all the more convincing by fine acting including by Brazilian newcomer Edison Alcaide as Jean Charles and the fact that the filmmakers worked closely with the De Menezes family.

Producer Kwadjo Dajan explained, “We went through every single official document, inquest report, and then we started interviewing various people who had personal connections to the case, including senior officers... We’ve got to speak to the armed police officers who actually shot Jean Charles, unofficially, and then with all of that material we decided that there’s only one way we can do this—if we’ve got his family’s approval... and they were on board straight away.”

Pope hopes that Suspect will right the “anomalies, disinformation and obfuscation” surrounding Jean Charles’ killing.

Episode 1 opens in the wake of the July 7 suicide bombings.

Forensic officer Cliff Todd (Daniel Mays) is shown slowly walking through sweltering railway tunnels recovering body parts while at New Scotland Yard Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Commissioner Sir Ian Blair (Conleth Hill), Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick (Russell Tovey) and Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman (Max Beesley) frantically discuss a response. Blair is portrayed as grandstanding in public briefings, brushing aside his advisors’ concerns, particularly those of Paddick.

The episode introduces the gentle-mannered Jean Charles, who works hard as an electrician by day and as a kitchen hand in the evenings, telling his mother back in Brazil not to worry about his safety and praised by his boss who tells him, “You’re my go-to guy now.” Jean Charles goes happily about his daily life.

The episode ends with four July 21 plotters—a fifth has cold feet—attempting to set off their backpack bombs. When the detonators do not work properly they flee, sustaining only minor back wounds.

To his credit, Pope does not fall into the “evil Muslim terrorist” stereotype saying, “We did not want to reduce them to clichéd automatons—we wanted them to have a life and personalities. They go and play six-a side football. We took a lot of care with a scene where one of them is with his wife and they have three young boys. We tried to flesh them out so they weren’t cartoon baddies.” At one point we hear one of the bombers exclaim, “We call it jihad. They call it foreign policy.”

Tension grows in episode 2 as police uncover via a gym membership card that one failed bomber, Osman Hussain, lives in a block of flats in Tulse Hill, above the flat occupied by Jean Charles.

On the following day a police surveillance operation is mounted outside the flats. When Jean Charles leaves for work, although it is plainly clear he is a shaved white man and Osman a bearded black Somalian, he is tailed to Stockwell station by CO19 firearms officers (now renamed Specialist Firearms Command or MO19). They have been briefed on a possible “Kratos” shoot-to-kill order from surveillance commander Cressida Dick (Emily Mortimer) and told that “you can take that decision if the suspect is non-compliant at your own discretion”.

At Stockwell station, despite no officer prepared to fully confirm Jean Charles’ identity and faulty radios hampering communications, firearms officers storm his carriage. In uncompromising detail the reconstruction shows him pinned to his seat and shot seven times at point-blank range. Blood splatters on the windows and officers’ faces. The back of his head is blown off.

“They were heavy days,” says Alcaide of the filming, noting that the cast and crew wanted “to make the story as truthful as possible. None of us wanted to avoid the tough reality of what happened.”

Episode 3 deals with the aftermath of the shooting. Dick appears triumphant and relinquishes her role as Gold Commander of the July 21 operation claiming a success. When asked why her decision log only begins after Jean Charles left home, she replies, “The first hour was appalling. No structure. But we got a grip on things after that.” Dick insists she never authorised the use of a critical shot.

The CO19 officers realise that “We’re on our own” and meet up to concoct a story in which they will say they shouted “Armed Police!” and Jean Charles ignored the challenge, stood up and came towards them.

Their lies are exposed as we witness the questioning of the other passengers in Jean Charles’ carriage—all 17 deny the officers had shouted “Armed Police!”.

It is supposedly not until four hours and forty minutes after the shooting that someone looks in Jean Charles’ wallet and discovers who he really is. Blair continues to repeat the CO19 version of events at a press conference, with Paddick complaining to colleagues, “The man we shot was a Brazilian tourist, yet Ian is out there saying the man was refusing to obey instructions as if he was a terrorist”. Blair prevents an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for three days.

It is not until the final riveting scenes of the episode that IPCC secretary Lana Vandenberghe (Laura Aikman), sickened at the police deception and the treatment of the De Menezes family, takes the decision to become a whistleblower and the truth begins to become public.

The last episode dramatizes the inquest into Jean Charles’s death held over three years later in the autumn of 2008. Blair is evasive as his earlier public statements are picked apart and in a tense cross-examination, Paddick as a witness contradicts his timeline, implying that Blair lied. Dick sticks to her story, contemptuously denying that any police mistakes were made.

The scene cuts to the Jean Charles’ railway carriage, eerily empty except for his fallen body, and then to his funeral in Brazil—a bright procession of mourners paying tribute.

The final shock of the episode comes when the jury retires to deliberate and the coroner tells them they are not allowed to give an unlawful killing verdict. Their only options are “lawful killing”, or an open verdict and answering “yes”, “no” or “cannot decide” to 10 questions about the police version of events. Their declaration of an open verdict and their answers—including “no” to did officers shout “Armed Police” or that Jean Charles move towards them—was, as the WSWS stated at the time, “a damning indictment of the multiple failures of the police and the lies they told.” It was the strongest possible outcome given the coroner’s strict limits.

As the credits begin to roll we are informed:

- The only judgement against the MPS was a £175,000 fine for breaching Health and Safety Laws.

- No culpability was attached to Cressida Dick who was promoted to MPS Commissioner in 2017 and made a Dame in 2019.

- It was revealed in 2014 that undercover police officers had infiltrated the Justice for Jean campaign.

- Paddick was forced to resign in 2007 and still maintains that at least 25 people knew before Blair that Jean Charles was innocent.

- Blair continued as Commissioner until 2008 and now sits in the House of Lords as a Life Peer.

These statements are a confirmation of the reports and analysis by the WSWS of the killing of Jean Charles as a state murder, and how every investigation and inquiry by the state into such heinous crimes ends in a rigged cover-up designed to protect the guilty.

Another key player in the state cover-up, ignored by the drama, must be identified. Sir Keir Starmer. as head of the Crown Prosecution Service (2008-13) dropped disciplinary charges against the police officers involved in Jean Charles’ killing. In doing so, he granted police a de facto licence to kill, legitimising the draconian counter-terror policies of Tony Blair’s Labour Party government and its Kratos policy, agreed in secret without any public debate.

Today Starmer sits as prime minister and head of a Labour government ruling, the Socialist Equality Party explained, as “a militarist cabal, the most right-wing and authoritarian government in post-war British history”. He is “determined to prevent a peace deal in Ukraine, is drenched in the blood of the Palestinians and seeking to impose savage attacks on the working class to fuel a forced march to war with catastrophic consequences.”