Legal challenges have launched against the Metropolitan police on Monday by the traumatised relatives of dead children whose identities were stolen by undercover officers.
"The Metropolitan Police Service received a letter of claim dated 4th February 2020 on behalf of six claimants. The claims relate to the historical use of deceased children’s identities by undercover officers", the Met said, as reported by ITV.
“The MPS is investigating the claims and is unable to comment further at this time".
A number of grieving families were left distressed after finding that polices spies had infiltrated activist groups using the identities of their deceased young relatives without permission or informing them
Six members of the families of four of the deceased children initiated a lawsuit against the Met, saying they are appalled and angered by the behaviour of undercover officers. The legal challenge, which is being submitted through a formal claim to Scotland Yard, insists that the Met abused private information and encroached on their personal grief which causes distress and impacted their mental health.
David Crossland's family, including his wife Daphne, and their two young children, Kevin and Lynne, died in a plane crash in Yugoslavia in 1966.
Crossland's widow, Liisa, whom he married after she nursed his recovery from the accident in a London hospital, told the BBC that said she did not think her husband, who was plagued with survivors guilt after the incident, would have been “able to cope” had he discover his dead son’s identity had been stolen by police.
“He never, never forgot his family, he regularly visited their grave, and this would’ve been too much”, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
Kevin’s identity had been used by undercover officer James Straven, who constructed a fake profile to infiltrated animal rights groups for five years.
Among the other victims is Rod Richardson who died at birth, Neil Martin, a severely disabled boy who passed away at six-years-old in 1969, and a teenager who drowned after falling from a trawler into the sea a year earlier.
The two brothers of 18-year-old Michael Hartley, who's body was never recovered after felling from the trawler, recently discovered that an undercover officer had been using Hartley’s name to spy on two left-wing organisations - the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) between 1982 and 1985.
Bennett said he was “totally disgusted” by the police’s conduct, adding that he never believed the English police would stoop to such depths.
“One thing all of those families have in common is that the appalling experience that they’ve had to bear, in terms of people losing a sibling, or a child, has been retriggered by learning that their loved one’s identity has been used in this way", solicitor Jules Carey told Today. “And not only are many of them suffering a fresh grief by being brought up in this way, but their memories of their lost child or their sibling has been significantly tarnished and interfered with by learning it's been used in this way".
Peter Skelton QC, who represents the Met, told the Undercover Policing Inquiry in November that the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which functioned between 1968 and 2008, had used dead children’s identities to develop effective cover since the early 1970s.
“They ceased to do so by 1994-5 with the advent of computerisation of the births and deaths records, although there are examples of use by undercover officers of these identities after this time”, he said. “The Met wishes to acknowledge plainly that while this practice was in use, insufficient consideration was given to the impact that it might have on the families of the children concerned. The Met appreciates that it was capable of causing distress to those families, and apologises for that".
Around 42 undercover officers constructed fake identities based on information gathered from dead children as part of an infiltration tactic that was used systematically for over 3 decades.
The practice was deployed by Scotland Yard’s secretive SDS, and later, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which penetrated protest groups and political organisations from 1968 onwards for 40 years.
Officers would reportedly spend hours looking into birth and death certificates in official archives to determine appropriate personas before being issued forged identity records, including driving licenses and passports, bearing the name of a dead child.
They often visited the areas where the children had lived, visited their graves, and researched relatives to acclimate themselves with their new identity.
