Raoul Moat inquest: Amnesty International questions Taser use

September 24, 2011
Jamie Doward, The Guardian

Amnesty International has written to the coroner conducting the inquest into the death of Raoul Moat questioning how police came to fire a non-lethal weapon at him despite a Home Office study concluding it was inaccurate and unreliable.

The human rights group said it wanted to establish whether the officers who fired the experimental Xrep Taser were aware of research conducted on behalf of the Home Office Scientific Development Branch, the body that evaluates specialist equipment. The research found the weapon was unlikely to be effective and had a high risk of missing its target. Officers using the weapon shot at Moat twice. One round missed and the other appeared to strike him without effect.

Oliver Sprague, Amnesty's UK arms programme director, said: "It's alarming that officers chose to deploy a weapon whose testing data had shown it to be highly inaccurate and highly likely to fail. Lessons must be learned from this and no weapon should be deployed by any UK police force until it has been officially sanctioned by the Home Office."

The Moat inquest is expected to last a further four weeks.