The cab driver claimed one armed officer, W42, was in a rage "like someone who had lost their senses". He claimed that it was W42 who opened fire on Duggan. The inquest has already heard other evidence that it was a different officer that fired the fatal shot. The cab driver said he saw Duggan shot in the back by police and described cotton from his jacket being blown out by the force of the bullet.
This clashes with forensic evidence heard previously by the jury which says the first shot struck Duggan in one of his biceps. The second, entered through Duggan's chest and exited his back. When later asked about his evidence, the taxi driver said he had not seen Duggan being shot. He said he was "very much surprised" when police shot Duggan and left the stand saying: "My thoughts are with the family.
Opening the inquest, counsel to the inquiry, Ashley Underwood QC warned the jury that the evidence was complex and contradictory: "An awful lot of the evidence is going to point in all sorts of different directions.
This article is more than 8 years old. Driver says he saw Duggan holding nothing in his hands when Duggan ran from taxi moments before shooting by police. The taxi driver who drove the minicab that Mark Duggan was travelling in just before he was shot dead by police marksmen told a court he would never be able to wipe the incident from his mind.
Giving evidence in the trial of Kevin Hutchinson-Foster, who is accused of providing Duggan with a handgun minutes before he was killed on 4 August last year, the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said his black cab was surrounded by armed police as it travelled in Tottenham, north London, before his passenger fled the taxi and was shot. He had collected Duggan from Hoxton, east London, and taken him to an address in Leyton where Duggan had collected a box from another man, jurors at Snaresbrook crown court in east London heard.
The prosecution claims Duggan collected the gun in a shoebox from Hutchinson-Foster before continuing to Tottenham where he was stopped by police. Asked by prosecutor Edward Brown QC if he could remember the events clearly, the taxi driver said: "I've not forgotten anything. It was such an incident that a person cannot forget about these things, even at night.
The cab driver, who spoke Punjabi translated into English by an interpreter, was asked to give his account of the shooting of Duggan, 29, whose death sparked widespread riots last year.
He said he had stopped at traffic lights on Ferry Lane, and they had then turned green. He said: "When I moved forward a little bit I noticed that vehicles were approaching at very high speed from the rear.
It felt as if it was going to collide with me. If the whole point of the operation was the collection of a gun, why was such a key piece of evidence allowed to be effectively destroyed? One possible scenario is that the gun was never in the shoebox. Police could have intercepted it after it had been used in Dalston, had it with them when Mark was killed and planted it on the grass. Another possible scenario is that police took the gun from the shoebox after Mark was killed and put it on the grass.
After the cab left Burchell Road it made its way to Tottenham, north London. The cab driver said he never saw Mark open the shoebox during the journey. Police followed the car. The last movement of the cab was recorded on its GPS 43 seconds after 6. Some 20 seconds earlier Mark had spoken to his brother Marlon on the phone. As officers surrounded the car shouting 47 seconds after 6.
Moments later Mark was shot. Witness B told the inquest they heard a commotion and looked out of their window to see a man being gunned down in the street.
They said they began filming 30 seconds after the shots were fired. They said that Mark was holding a Blackberry phone in his right hand and looked baffled as he raised his arms, as if surrendering.
Only one other officer recorded seeing Mark with a gun. During the inquest police claimed that the gun ended up on the grass because Mark threw it there. Yet no officer said they saw a gun flying through the air. The officer who shot Mark claimed he shot him first in the chest then in his right biceps. Yet expert witnesses argued that Mark had first been shot in his arm then sustained the fatal wound to his chest.
Pathologist Derrick Pounder said the gun was sufficiently heavy to require considerable muscular effort to throw it four metres. Mark was right handed and had sustained a painful wound to his right biceps. The inquest established that officers had the scene to themselves for some 20 minutes before the ambulance crew arrived. One officer known as V59 wrote a statement days after the shooting. He wrote that another officer, R31, had informed him that a gun had been found near where Mark was shot.
When armed response officers arrived at the scene, V59 said he directed them to secure a firearm on grass at the other side of a fence. He gave this testimony again in January and May , and to the inquest in October last year. The armed response officers also gave this evidence to the inquest. The video shows officer Z51 walking to the area where the gun was allegedly found 34 seconds after V59 said he told armed response officers to secure it.
0コメント