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| Met Police officer Anthony Long cleared of Azelle Rodney murder | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| A police marksman has been cleared of murder 10 years after he shot dead a suspected armed robber. | |
| Azelle Rodney, 24, was killed in Mill Hill, north London, in April 2005. | Azelle Rodney, 24, was killed in Mill Hill, north London, in April 2005. |
| Anthony Long told the the Old Bailey he made the split-second decision to open fire as he thought his colleagues were in "imminent" danger. | |
| Mr Long, 58, allegedly took just six hundredths of a second to open fire on Mr Rodney in a police operation to foil an attempted robbery. | |
| The trial heard he fired off eight shots in 2.1 seconds, six of which fatally injured Mr Rodney, who was the back seat passenger of a Volkswagen Golf, which was boxed in during the "hard stop" by armed police in Hale Lane. | |
| In making the split-second decision to open fire, the prosecution asserted Mr Long would not have had time to see whether Mr Rodney was doing anything that might pose a risk to the public and police. | |
| But retired Mr Long, who was commended seven times during his distinguished 33-year career with the force, maintained he believed his colleagues were in danger. | |
| At the time, police intelligence had suggested the gang was armed with at least one deadly machine gun as they prepared to strike a gang of Colombian drug dealers in Edgware, north London, on the evening of Saturday 30 April 2005. | |
| However, a search of the car later revealed that although there were three weapons, none were automatic and only one was loaded, the Old Bailey heard. | |
| After deliberating for 12 hours and nine minutes the jury found him not guilty of murder. | |
| The jury was not told the outcome of a judge-led inquiry in 2013 which concluded that the shooting was not legally justified and Mr Long's accounts of what he saw in the seconds before opening fire should not be accepted. | |
| The BBC's Danny Shaw said Susan Alexander, Azelle Rodney's mother, said it was time to "draw a painful line under the last 10 years" and that her son's death was "wholly avoidable" - but she accepted the jury had spoken. | |
| And he said the verdict would be a huge relief to the Met Police, with there being serious concerns a guilty verdict would have led firearms officers to withdraw from the role. |