Sitting at the launch of BBC backstage yesterday my heart went cold as one of the speakers fired up his presentation. As he flicked from his desktop to the slides, all of us saw the front page of the BBC open in his browser and the headline:

"Shot man was not bomber"

What a tragedy.

What a tragedy and one it is all too easy to see from both sides. For Jean Charles de Menezes a group of plainclothed men shouting and brandishing guns would doubtless have been petrifying. Did he not trust that they were police and were the next few seconds a tragedy of errors or did he believe them and simply make a terribly wrong judgement?

From the policeman's perspective, any hesitation may well have resulted in his death and that of many around him. What could he possibly have done or said? "Put the bomb down and walk away from the crowd". This isn't your usual movie.

Friday's script was finalised from the second Jean Charles, a man already under observation, first ran into the entrance of the crowded underground. The question was not whether the police should have taken the action they did but whether they properly informed him that they were in fact police. I suspect that were Friday to be replayed tomorrow it would still have the same or even a more tragic ending.

My heart goes out to both Jean Charles' family and the policeman who shot him.