THE GUARDIAN 🔵 Man shot dead in car by Met officer was not posing threat to life, jury told

A Metropolitan police firearms officer accused of shooting a man dead through a car windscreen may have been “angry, frustrated and annoyed” when he did so, a jury has heard.

Martyn Blake shot Chris Kaba on 5 September 2022 in Streatham, south London. Kaba was followed by police while driving an Audi car before armed officers stopped and surrounded his vehicle.

The trial of Blake, 40, an authorised firearms officer with the Met, opened on Wednesday at the Old Bailey in central London. He denies murder.

Opening the case, the prosecutor Tom Little KC told the jury that at the point Blake decided to open fire, the car Kaba, 24, was driving was blocked in and there was no imminent danger to the police officers surrounding it. Police had shouted at Kaba and attempts were made to break his vehicle window and get him out of the vehicle.

Little said: “For a firearms officer to shoot and kill it should, understandably, be a remedy of last resort. The body-worn footage and footage from cameras on police vehicles, reveals, we say [of] what happened, that it was not necessary to shoot. That is why, we say, that this is a case of murder rather than the use of lawful self-defence or lawful defence of another.

“The defendant did not know the man he shot. What he was thinking at the time only he knows.”

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Little said the crown would ask the jury to consider whether a standoff between Kaba in the Audi, who drove forwards and backwards trying to escape, and officers “caused the defendant to become angry, frustrated and annoyed”.

Little said: “Chris Kaba had made a previous attempt to escape by driving forwards, had failed and now he had far less space to accelerate forwards. We say that, on careful analysis of all of the evidence, nothing Chris Kaba did in the seconds before he was shot justified this defendant’s decision to shoot.

“He shot him once straight to the head. He was trained to use a firearm and if necessary to shoot knowing that almost inevitably death would follow … The defendant did so when Chris Kaba was sitting in the driver’s seat of an Audi motor vehicle with both of his hands on the steering wheel.”

Little said the crown would argue that it “was far from obvious” that there was space for Kaba to escape, and that his vehicle had become penned in: “There was, we say, no real or immediate threat to the life of anybody present at the scene and at the all important point in time when the defendant fired that fatal shot.

“You will have to decide what, if any, the imminent and immediate risk was and to whom – if anyone – and what the defendant honestly believed about that and what was reasonably necessary for him to do as a result.”

Little added: “We suggest that the real issue in this case is this: was this a case of mistaken belief as to risk or, as we say, was this an unlawful decision to kill? In driving forwards towards the police vehicle that was blocking his [Kaba’s] immediate path there had been an element of initial danger, albeit that the speed … was not particularly fast.

“None of the authorised firearms officers were injured. Chris Kaba then only drove backwards a short distance before he was shot and killed. His vehicle was stationary at that time.”

Police were not in imminent danger, the jury was told. Little said: “Just after the Audi became stationary the defendant decided to shoot Chris Kaba. He should not, we say on all the evidence, have done so.”

The jury was shown a reconstruction of the scene and video of the lead-up to the shooting and when the shot was fired.

The judge, Mr Justice Goss, told jurors they would decide on the lawfulness of the shooting and they should do that based only on the evidence presented in the court during the trial.

Members of Kaba’s family, including his parents, sat in the well of the court just metres from Blake in the dock as Little laid out the case for the prosecution.

Little said the night before Kaba was shot, a suspected firearms incident in Brixton was reported to police. The Audi Kaba was shot in was linked to that incident, the jury heard.

Details of the Audi, including its registration, were included in the specialist firearms command daily briefing circulated on 5 September, the court heard. Little said the vehicle was of potential interest to the police and a firearms marker was placed on it.

At 9.51pm on 5 September, officers in a police car parked on Camberwell Church Street spotted the Audi. Police decided to follow it, and a decision was made that the Audi should be stopped by armed officers, the jury was told.

It would come to a halt in Kirkstall Gardens, where the shot that killed Kaba was fired. Little said: “The cause of his death was a single gunshot wound to the head with associated catastrophic traumatic brain injury. The bullet was recovered from the skull of Chris Kaba during the postmortem examination that followed his death.”

The trial continues. The jury was told it may take about three weeks to complete.