A Met Police marksmen on trial for murdering Chris Kaba may have fired the fatal shot after losing his temper when the victim ignored requests by officers to surrender, the Old Bailey has heard.
Martyn Blake, 40, shot Mr Kaba, 24, in the head through the front windscreen of an Audi during a ‘hard stop’ in Streatham, southeast London, on September 5, 2022.
Opening the case today, prosecutor Tom Little KC said the ‘unassailable evidence of what actually took place that night’ reveals the decision to pull the trigger when he did ‘was not reasonably justified or justifiable’.
He told jurors that officers’ body-worn footage and footage from police cars shows that it was not necessary to shoot, adding: ‘The immediate risk to both the defendant and his fellow officers at the scene did not, we say, justify at the point when the trigger is pulled… firing a bullet into the vehicle that Chris Kaba was driving.’
Mr Little told the jury that the defendant did not know the man who he shot but asked ‘whether the requests made to Chris Kaba by the police that had not been obeyed by him caused the defendant to become angry, frustrated and annoyed’.
The prosecutor went on: ‘There can be no doubt you may think that the defendant must have intended to incapacitate the driver of the vehicle … 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, and that is what he did.’
The jury was told that Mr Kaba was shot as he was sitting in the driver’s seat of an Audi, with both his hands on the steering wheel.
He had tried to drive away from police but had hit a police vehicle in front, before reversing and hitting another.
It was not clear that there was room for Mr Kaba to have escaped and driven away, Mr Little told the jury.
He said that Mr Kaba could have been followed by police cars or a helicopter had he managed to get free.
‘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.’
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He told the jury that they will have to decide what the immediate risk was, if any, and what the defendant honestly believed about that, and what was reasonably necessary for him to do as a result.
Blake, who in the case was formerly referred to as NX121, denies murder.
The trial continues.
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