VANCOUVER, (Reuters) – “Shameful conduct” by Canadian police officers led to the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski in a stun gun incident at Vancouver’s airport that drew world attention, an inquiry said yesterday.
The officers acted as if they were responding to a “barroom brawl” and were too aggressive when it was clear they were only dealing with a man who was distraught and confused on arriving in a new homeland, the inquiry said.
“This case is, at its heart, the story of shameful conduct by a few officers,” inquiry head Thomas Braidwood wrote in his report, which also accuses the officers of making misleading statements to justify their actions.
“Mister Dziekanski in no way brought this upon himself,” Braidwood, a retired provincial judge, told reporters in Vancouver. “He was not aggressive in any manner.”
The Polish government, which participated in the provincial inquiry, asked Canadian prosecutors yesterday to reconsider their earlier decision not to file criminal charges against the four Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers.
British Columbia later said that a special prosecutor would be named to review the matter.
Braidwood said he was not criticizing the RCMP as a whole, but his report comes a day after the iconic police force was sharply criticized by another inquiry over its handling of the 1985 Air India bombing case.
Dziekanski died in October 2007 shortly after he was repeatedly shocked with a Taser stun gun and subdued by four RCMP officers who had responded to reports of a drunken and disruptive man at the airport.
A bystander’s video of Dziekanski screaming on the floor as he died was broadcast around the world, drawing public outrage and contradicting initial police statements that they shot him after having to wrestle him to the ground.
Dziekanski was immigrating to Canada to join his mother Zofia Cisowski, who had been waiting at the airport to meet him but had left after being erroneously told by officials there that he had not arrived.
That mistake left Dziekanski, who spoke only Polish, waiting alone for several hours with no information on what he was to do next.
