[2] On 6 April 2006, the inquest jury at St Pancras Coroner's Court in London returned a verdict of unlawful killing, finding that Miller had been "murdered.

After meetings with the Miller family, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, sent a formal request to his Israeli counterpart in June 2007 for prosecution proceedings to be enacted within six weeks against the soldier responsible for firing the shot.

[4] He reported from the civil war in Algeria and from most of the world's major trouble spots from 1995 onwards, working for CNN, and for all the leading news broadcasters in Britain.

Miller then formed a professional association with television reporter Saira Shah, to make Beneath the Veil, about the life of women in Taliban-run Afghanistan.

This film, shown on Dispatches and CNN, repeated the success of Prime Suspects by again winning the RTS International Current Affairs award.

"[13] The documentary which Miller was making on the day of his death (Death in Gaza, released by HBO in 2004) depicts Miller and his colleagues leaving the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah refugee camp after dark, carrying a white flag, towards two IDF armored personnel carriers manned by nine soldiers of the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion, a unit of Bedouin Arab-Israeli soldiers.

"[16] IDF spokesman, Captain Jacob Dallal said, "Our forces found a tunnel at the house in question, when an anti-tank missile was fired on them.

The Israeli military expresses sorrow at a civilian death, but it must be stressed that a cameraman who knowingly enters a combat zone, especially at night, endangers himself.

Despite advice from the Israeli Military Advocate General that he be disciplined for breaching the rules of engagement, illegal use of weapons, and misconduct during the investigation, he was cleared of wrongdoing.

"[22] The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation into Miller's death which was led by Detective Rob Anderson of the Specialist Crime Directorate.

The Metropolitan Police was refused permission to send officers to Israel and the Gaza Strip in order to visit the site of the shooting and interview soldiers and witnesses to the incident and the Israeli government did not release vital documents to the Coroner.

The family charge that the Israeli army did not act with reasonable caution when troops opened fire on Miller, who was holding a white flag.

Miller's widow Sophy said the family was determined to find justice and put an end to the "culture of impunity" within the Israeli army.

"It is our hope that as well as accountability for James' death a successful civil case will go some way towards changing this and in doing so may make Israeli soldiers think twice about shooting innocent civilians," she told The Guardian.

Giving evidence at the inquest, Miller's wife Sophy named the Israeli soldier who shot her husband as First Lieutenant Heib from the Bedouin Desert Reconnaissance Battalion, who was commanding a unit at the time of the killing on 2 May 2003.

[27] Independent investigator Chris Cobb-Smith, who had previously served in the British Army and as an Iraq weapons inspector, found there was no way the soldier fired by accident.

[1] Miller's family asked that the British government ensure his killer is prosecuted, accusing the Israeli authorities of "an abject failure to uphold the fundamental and unequivocal standards of international humanitarian and human rights law.

"[1] In June 2007, Lord Goldsmith, the then outgoing Attorney General for England and Wales, sent a request to his Israeli counterpart, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, for legal proceedings to be enacted within six weeks to prosecute the soldier responsible for the killing,[3] which included new analysis of audio evidence which confirmed that the shot that killed Miller was fired from an Israeli armored personnel carrier.

[29] Miller's sister, Anne Waddington, was interviewed by the BBC on the morning of 7 August 2007, the day the six-week deadline was due to expire.

She said, "Unfortunately, we have had four and a half extremely painful years of experiencing the Israeli tactics, and they are the masters of delay – they have always played for time, and they have always failed to deliver."

She added, "The Israelis put out a lot of false and misleading statements immediately after my brother was murdered, and they did try to suggest he was killed by a Palestinian in the back and as a result of crossfire, but they put out many, many lies and false stories, which of course have been shown not only on the APTN video footage of the actual murder, but also through eyewitness testimony and the additional evidence which was very, very clear at the time."

[3] After being informed of his response, Miller's family issued a statement: We are very pleased that General [sic] Mazuz has replied within the time limit set out in Lord Goldsmith's letter.