Innocent in London

David Mery’s story of being arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist is profoundly depressing for anyone with even the vaguest care for civil liberties.
What is of most concern is the fact that it’s farily obvious that the police realised early on that he was completely innocent, but proceeded anyway because they wanted to make it look like they had reasonably grounds to detain him in the first place. The odd addition of various "facts" (that he was fiddling with a wire, despite the fact he had nothing that could be construed as a wire on him), the searches, the apparent desperation to find anything that might mean they were justified in arresting him. It all smacks of a system gone mad.
The fact is that Mery should simply have been released once searched. The fact that he wasn’t indicates that something is going wrong with the system – and that the police are wasting valuable time and resources chasing dead ends.