By Caitlin Pike
ITV News’s exclusive on the internal police investigation into the
shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station
gave it a 27 per cent share of viewing between 6.30 and 7.00pm on
Tuesday night.
ITV News was supplied with secret documents and photos from the
investigation into the shooting on 22 July which revealed a
catastrophic failure of the surveillance operation and showed that de
Menezes seemed unaware he was being followed.
Craig Oliver, head
of output, ITV News said: “This was an old-fashioned scoop in the best
tradition of ITN/ITV News. Our journalists spent a significant period
of time chasing down the story. We had to do a phenomenal amount of
work in just one day to make sure that we told the story and that we
got it right.
“When we obtained the photographs we immediately realised that this was even bigger than we originally thought.
By
Tuesday afternoon, we were getting calls from all over Fleet Street,
saying they knew we were onto something big and asking us what it was.”
Oliver
refuted claims by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, who are
carrying out the investigation, that the family of de Menezes learnt of
the findings by watching it on the news. “We fully briefed Jean
Charles’ family – who supported the running of the story.
Claims by the IPCC that they first heard of it on television just aren’t true,” he said.
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