Mark Duggan Inquest: Police Chief Heckled

Furious Mark Duggan supporters drowned out police chief Mark Rowley as he read a statement which defended the armed officer who killed the 29-year-old.

Security staff protected the Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner as protesters chanted insults including "racists", "scum" and "murderers".

Mr Duggan was shot dead by armed police in Tottenham in summer 2011, sparking rioting in London that eventually spread to other cities.

The angry scenes came after an inquest jury found Mr Duggan was unarmed when he was shot dead but was still killed using lawful force.

The jury said they believed he had a gun in the taxi immediately before police stopped the vehicle in August 2011, but that he threw the weapon over railings as soon as he left the cab - and before an armed officer fired the fatal shot.

Assistant Commissioner Rowley later issued a statement defending the "split-second decisions" made by officers and expressing sympathy with Mr Duggan's family.

He said: "Mark Duggan had a gun ... our officer had an honest and reasonable belief that Mark Duggan still had the gun when he shot him."

He also offered to meet the family in person.

Screams and shouts of "rubbish" and "he was murdered" were heard inside London's Royal Courts of Justice when the verdict was delivered on Wednesday afternoon.

Some supporters of Mr Duggan stormed out of the courtroom, others had to be restrained, and a door was reportedly smashed in.

Carole Duggan, Mr Duggan's aunt, told reporters outside court: "He was executed and we still believe that.

"We are going to fight until we have no breath in our body for justice for Mark, for his children, for all the deaths in custody."

The family's lawyer, Marcia Willis Stewart, said they were "in a state of shock" and called the outcome a "perverse judgement".

Police intelligence in 2011 had suggested Mr Duggan was a gang member involved in gun and drugs crimes.

On the day he was killed, officers believed he had just collected a gun from east London.

However, the jury of seven women and three men also decided that police had not done enough to collect and react to intelligence about those claims.

A firearms officer shot Mr Duggan twice when he emerged from a minicab that police had 'hard stopped' in Tottenham, north London, on August 4, 2011.

One bullet went through his arm, the other hit his chest and killed him.

At the centre of the inquest was the issue of a handgun, found, said police, 10 to 20 feet from Mr Duggan's body and on the other side of park railings.

In heated exchanges with the Duggan family lawyer, police denied suggestions they had planted the gun.

The weapon was wrapped in a sock.

Neither had any trace of Mr Duggan's DNA or fingerprints, but his prints were found on a shoebox police said had been used to carry the gun inside the minicab.

One witness, Witness B, told jurors Mr Duggan was "definitely" holding a phone in his hand when he was killed.

But the police marksman who fired the shots, granted anonymity, told the inquest he had "an honestly held belief" that the suspect had a gun and was about to shoot him.

Mr Duggan's death prompted rioting in Tottenham, which eventually spread to other areas of the capital and beyond.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is still investigating the incident.

In an interim statement in August, it said it had so far found no evidence of criminality by police officers.

But Mr Duggan's family has said it has not been kept fully informed of the investigation's progress and condemned the IPCC for suggesting early on that Mr Duggan, a father of six, had died in "a shoot-out with police".

Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley's statement expressed condolences to the family but also defended the tactics of armed police.

He said: "No officer sets out at the start of the day to run an operation that results in someone dying. So our sympathy today is with Mark Duggan's family. They have lost a loved one.

"But the task our officers face in making split-second decisions when confronting armed criminals means there is a risk - a very small risk - that this will happen.

"Armed criminals have shot dead more than 50 people in London in the last three and a half years.

"We send out well-trained, professional armed officers thousands of times a year to combat this threat, only firing shots once or twice. These careful tactics have significantly reduced gun crime."

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