Terror in London - Panic cannot justify shoot to kill policy

FEARS of a long hot summer of terror in London were heightened yesterday when armed police gunned down a suspected suicide bomber at a tube station in a city suburb.

But, in a horrendous example of how things can go badly wrong in panic situations, it emerged the dead man was not one of the four bombers from Thursday’s abortive assault on the capital.

While the police insist he was linked with terrorism, the fact that the victim of the first shots fired on British soil in the war against terror proved not to be a suicide bomber, turns a potential coup into a public relations disaster.