POLICE IN LONDON have been accused of spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, the teenager whose racist murder 20 years has become one of the most controversial cases in British legal history.
The Guardian reports today that a former undercover officer in the Metropolitan Police’s controversial Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was told to spy on relatives of Lawrence, who was stabbed to death at a London bus stop in April 1993.
Peter Francis told the paper that he was asked to get any information on what was happening with the campaign for justice for Stephen whose murder would expose what an independent inquiry later said was “institutional racism” in the police force which investigated Stephen’s death.
“They wanted the campaign to stop. It was felt it was going to turn into an elephant,” Francis told the paper.
“Throughout my deployment there was almost constant pressure on me personally to find out anything I could that would discredit these campaigns.”
Francis also claims that senior officers n the Met chose to withhold this information from the Macperhson Inquiry into the police investigation into Lawrence’s death.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has this morning said that an investigation into the allegations must be carried out:
Speaking to the Guardian, Stephen’s mother Doreen Lawrence said that nothing could justify the actions of the police and said that out of everything she had learned in the years since her son’s death “this has certainly topped it”.
The Special Demonstrations Squad, a covert unit, has garnered significant attention in recent years following an extensive investigation by The Guardian.
The paper has exposed some of its operatives’ practices including adopting the identities of dead children and forming long-term sexual relationships with people they spied on, usually those affiliated to left-wing protest organisations.
Two men, Garry Dobson and David Norris, were last year convicted of the murder of Lawrence based on new forensic evidence, later losing an appeal against their sentences.
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