The father of Stephen Lawrence has welcomed the chance for evidence to be heard in public about how undercover police officers infiltrated the justice campaign for his son.
00:00The public inquiry into undercover policing was announced by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015 after former officer Peter Francis turned whistleblower.
00:16He told The Guardian newspaper that he had been tasked with gathering information to smear the Lawrence family, something the Metropolitan Police has always denied.
00:30It has already emerged that one undercover officer who used the fake name David Hagen as well as Mr Francis joined Movement for Justice in the late 1990s and remained a member for two or three years.
00:48This was during the Mac Thurston public inquiry into both Stephen's murder and the alleged corruption, racism and incompetence that dogged the police investigation into his death.
01:03Mr Francis attended the inquiry, pretending to be a supporter of the Lawrence campaign, while feeding information back to colleagues in the Met.
01:14In August of 1998, he met with acting detective inspector Richard Walton, who was working on Scotland Yard's final submissions to the inquiry and passed on details he had gathered while undercover.
01:30They included the fact that Stephen's parents had separated, but also information about the decisions made by the Lawrence family connected to the inquiry.
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