Hillsborough Files

[Kompressor]

The only comparsions are it involved - Liverpool fans, in another poorly managed stadium.

IMO the only similarities are that it took too long for an acceptance of blame be it partial or full and an apology.

The huge difference is Liverpool Fc are not put in place and employed to look after the general public, the government and police are.

The way football was supported back then and the state of the stadiums sadly meant that things like Heysel and Hillsborough were always going to happen.

The cover up afterwards and the length of it is the biggest disgrace.

[Gordon Gekko]

Heysel is a whole other story

There were no cover ups (although it was poorly handled and not accepted for a long time by the us) and convictions have been made

To bring up Heysel out of either spite or comparison holds little point as they are two completely different matters bar the fact that they both included LFC

[Gordon Gekko]

Anybody who missed it by the way or may lack knowledge about hillsborough, ITV aired this on Tuesday

http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=324782

Plus alot of what was found in 'todays' report had been public knowledge for the last 23 years, it was nice to finally hear coming from the mouth of senior politicians/david cameron

[stacksbranning]

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19545126

The inquiry into the disaster, led by Lord Chief Justice Taylor, established the main cause as a failure of police crowd control

(I.E failing to control the LIVAHPEWL fans who turned up to the stadium without tickets

[TF S4DK]

Did you even read it? Hell did you even look at the pictures?

[Nidge Weasle]

still get vex at how forgotten the bradford disaster is.

[Nidge Weasle]

/

heysel is definatly up for discussion when talking about hillsborough.

liverpool (and celtic) Offended by everything, embarrased by nothing.

but yea, glad the truth is finally coming out

[Kompressor]

/

heysel is definatly up for discussion when talking about hillsborough.

Why?

[Gordon Gekko]

You're talking sh*t mate. How is it up for discussion?

[Nidge Weasle]

we're discussing a fan tragedy at a football game, so you have to look into all the others.

/

theres a lot of juve fans who want "justice" for their fans, and still blame liverpool fans for Heysel (i dont agree with this btw).

[Rsonist]

Philos punishments and justice (to an extent) were handed out at the time after Heysel

[Nidge Weasle]

yes, but you ask most people and they will tell you heysel was an accident, bad ground, no crowd segregation a tragedy waiting to happen.

juve fans are offended by this and think it was caused by pissed up scousers causing trouble, crushing normal fans on their way to attack juve's ultras. a lot of them feel liverpool and its fans never took responsibility for what they did.

i dont agree with that, but i dont think its fair to just brush heysel aside and say it doesnt matter when talking about hillsborough.

[O Fenomeno]

^^That's what I am screaming

[Rsonist]

But it doesnt matter when speaking about Hillsborough really

Both are completely separate/different instances

[Nidge Weasle]

cant live life focussing on one thing and one thing only all the time. everythings connected

[Rsonist]

If we are being pedantic then yes

But there's no similarities with either disaster

Therefore it doesn't need connected

[TF S4DK]

Lol.

Liverpool was the biggest club in England at the time, with the biggest fanbase. You could ague there fans was victims of their own success.

Hillsborough could have happened to any club, many fans of other clubs had expresed fears over the same circumstances, when they had gone there. Some Liverpool fans had previously complained, and some fans at 89 say they only avoided it because they took different tickets having experienced close enough for them in '88.

[Rsonist]

[TF S4DK]

Your going to hell.

[stacksbranning]

Aint gown lie these pictures are effing chilling

[Kompressor]

yes, but you ask most people and they will tell you heysel was an accident, bad ground, no crowd segregation a tragedy waiting to happen.

juve fans are offended by this and think it was caused by pissed up scousers causing trouble, crushing normal fans on their way to attack juve's ultras. a lot of them feel liverpool and its fans never took responsibility for what they did.

i dont agree with that, but i dont think its fair to just brush heysel aside and say it doesnt matter when talking about hillsborough.

In all honesty, the Juventus fans were correct to be pissed by a lack of a proper apology and acceptance of their share of the blame. It shouldve come straight away, Liverpool and their fans finally decided to apologise in 2005, better late than never I guess. Still Liverpool FC their fans and their employees are not publicly elected to serve the people, do what's best for us and keep us safe.

However the biggest issue here isn't even the tragic incident that killed 96 football fans,

It's the blatant and disgusting lies that followed. Then the cover up. Perpetrated by our government and members of a "service" that is supposed to be working towards keeping us safe.

This is what separates this from Heysel, the way the AUTHORITIES covered up and LIED about what happened and maintained those LIES for 23 Years.

People claiming this should be in a room other than the sports room have more of a point than the people trying to link this to Heysel. this could be put in a thread talking about Smiley culture, Mark Duggan and police brutality. As we are talking about cover up perpetrated by people in authority.

So no this is not a thread about "Football disaster's" otherwise why are only 2 being mentioned. There have been hundreds.

Can't believe you people have me spouting lines a Scouser would be proud of,

Goodnight.

[Young £]

41 of the 96 could potentially have been saved

66. Disclosed documents provide no rationale for the Coroner’s exceptional decision to take samples for blood alcohol measurement from all of the deceased. (including the deceased under the age of the drinking limit, eg a 10 year old)

67. The implicit and explicit use of a blood alcohol level of 80mg/100ml as a marker was unjustified. This level has relevance to the rapid response times of individuals in charge of motor vehicles, but none to people attending a leisure event.

63. There was clear evidence from the post mortem reports that 28 of those who died did not have traumatic asphyxia with obstruction of the blood circulation, and asphyxia may have taken significantly longer to be fatal. There was separate evidence that in 31 the heart and lungs had continued to function after the crush, and in 16 of these this was for a prolonged period.

64. It was asserted repeatedly, by the Coroner, by the High Court in the Judicial Review proceedings and by the Stuart-Smith Scrutiny, that the effects of asphyxia were irreversible by the time each of those who died was removed from the pens. Yet individuals in each of the groups now identified could have had potentially reversible asphyxia. Resuscitation of an unconscious person with a heartbeat is much more likely to be successful than if cardiac arrest has already occurred, as was previously assumed. While they remained unconscious, these individuals were vulnerable to a new event, particularly further airway obstruction from inappropriate positioning.

114. The rationale presented by the Coroner for selecting 3.15pm as the cut-off, acknowledged as appropriate by the High Court in the Judicial Review proceedings and the Stuart-Smith Scrutiny, was that all who died had suffered fatal and irreversible injuries by that time.

115. 3.15pm was chosen because it was an undisputed and recorded time when an ambulance arrived on the pitch. This served as a ‘marker’ and the Coroner rounded the time to the nearest quarter-hour.

116. The pathologists’ medical opinion underpinned the Coroner’s final decision. It concluded that all who died suffered irretrievable, fatal injury and there could be no recovery regardless of whether the deceased lived beyond 3.15pm. This opinion neglected the significance of the particular circumstances in which each individual died, including the absence of appropriate medical or treatment intervention.

129. The process of transition from self-taken recollections to formal Criminal Justice Act statements was presented as removing ‘conjecture’ and ‘opinion’ from the former, leaving only matters of ‘fact’ within the latter. Disclosed correspondence between SYP and the Force solicitors reveals that comments within officers’ statements ‘unhelpful to the Force’s case’ were altered, deleted or qualified (rewritten by the SYP team).

130. A significant number of SYP officers were uncomfortable with the methodology adopted in reviewing and altering their initial accounts and with the role of the SYP solicitors in this process. Senior SYP officers, including the Chief Constable, were aware of these concerns and the disclosed ‘Hillsborough updates’ demonstrate their attempts to assuage these concerns. An SYP inquiry liaison team was available to provide junior officers with ‘necessary information and assistance’ prior to giving evidence to the Taylor Inquiry.

131. Examination of officers’ statements shows that officers were discouraged from making criticisms of senior officers’ responses, their management and deficiencies in the SYP operational response: ‘key’ words and descriptions such as ‘chaotic’ were counselled against and, if included, were deleted.

132. Some 116 of the 164 statements identified for substantive amendment were amended to remove or alter comments unfavourable to SYP.

140. As the severity of the disaster was becoming apparent, SYP Match Commander, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, told a falsehood to senior officials that Liverpool fans had broken into the stadium and caused an inrush into the central pens thus causing the fatal crush. While later discredited, this unfounded allegation was broadcast internationally and was the first explanation of the cause of the disaster to enter the public domain.

141. Within days, further serious allegations emerged from unnamed sources, a Police Federation spokesperson and a local Conservative MP, Irvine Patnick. These were that Liverpool fans had conspired to arrive late, many were without tickets, were exceptionally drunk and aggressive and determined to force entry into the stadium.

142. On 19 April, four days after the disaster, The Sun newspaper published a front-page story under the banner headline, ‘THE TRUTH’, alleging that Liverpool fans had assaulted and urinated on police officers resuscitating the dying, stolen from the dead and verbally sexually abused an unconscious young woman.

1.99 When a face was recognised the number was called and the corresponding body was wheeled on a trolley to the gymnasium door. There was little time allowed for contemplation, touch was restricted and privacy denied. Relatives and friends of the deceased were then escorted to police officers sitting at tables, who took statements.

1.100 The identification process caused distress for families: the use of poor-quality Polaroid photographs, uncategorised by gender or age; the presentation of the dead in body bags, often in a dishevelled state; time and privacy, crucial for grieving, were denied as the police, pressured by the need to process waiting relatives, were keen to complete the identification quickly.

1.101 Following identification, relatives or friends were interviewed by CID officers. Questioning included details of their journeys to Sheffield, whether they had attended the match and whether they had consumed alcohol. Personal questioning extended to the reputations of their loved ones whom they had just identified. The primary objective appeared to be investigation rather than identification, a view corroborated by other workers involved.

[Young £]

Memo to news editor. London standard re – allegations over behaviour of liverpool fans at the hillsborough semi final. Story filed to you on april 18th.

The original storyfiled by us on the morning of april 18th led on angry police hitting out at liverpool fans who they said had hampered rescue attempts at the semi-final (our story catchlined ‘slam’).

During the afternoon of the 18th we received further information which was filed to you as the day progressed (catchlined pocket and patnick) adding allegations of fans stealing propert of the dead and later quotes from a leading mp backing up many of the police claims.

All the allegations in the stories we filed were made unsolicited by ranking officers in the south yorkshire force to three different experienced senior journalists who are partners in this agency. All four officers involved had been on duty at Hillsborough.

The first claims of bad behaviour came on the night of Saturday april 15th a few hours after the tragedy when one repporter met by chance a senior police officer he has known for many years.

Without (prompting?) the officer told him he had been punched and urinated on as he tried to save a dying victim at Hillsborough. The following day there was another chance meeting with a second officer who again without prompting said he had seen some fans behaving badly including attacking police and urinating on officers.

At this stage we felt it was not enough confirmation to send a story making such serious claims.

However, on Monday 17th another reporter met a third officer who volunteered information and re-iterated similar stories saying he seen police attacked and had been told of fans urinating down the terraces as police pulled away the dead and injured.

At that stage we felt we should tell the story and sent it out the following morning (Tue april 18th).

Later the same day a third reporter met a fourth officer he has known for many years who reported the allegations and added that liverpool supporters had been stealing from the dead. Though he had not seen it personally he said despite fingertip searches of the terracing alot of personal property belonging to the dead was missing and other officers had told him of pilfering.

We sent out the additional details plus a report by south yorkshire’s chief ambulance officer that one of his men was injured when attacked as he treated a fan on the pitch.

Further quotes were sent in a later story after we spoke to the tory mp for sheffield hallam irvine patnick. He said he had spoken to police officers on Saturday night who said they had been attacked and urinated on. He had not volunteered the information previously because he felt it would inflame a very sensitive situation.

We also added quotes from south yorkshire police federation secretary who said he had heard ‘terrible’ accounts of the behaviour of some fans.

In some respects we ‘watered down’ the allegations which included a report to us that liverpool fans seeing the uncovered breasts of a dead girl shouted ‘ pass her over here and we’ll f...her”

We felt we did as much as we could to check the authenticity of the story in the time available and reported faithfully what we were told.

Ends...

The statement by PC Maxwell Groome was one of "those most extensively altered" the report found.

The following material was deleted from his original account:"The decision to replace Chief Superintendent Mole before the semi-final needs to come under some scrutiny. This man had many years experience of policing big matches at Hillsborough.

Compared to other semi-finals held at Hillsborough, the organisation of this event was poor, as has been the case for most of the season. Too little notice had been taken of current trends and football intelligence and too much reliance has been placed upon previous information held.

Too many non-operational supervisory officers were in charge of important and critical parts of the football ground.

The deployment of officers around the crucial time needs to come under scrutiny, too many were sat around in the gymnasium whilst others were rushed off their feet."

He also wrote originally: "It was noticeable that the only supervisory officers above the rank of Inspector on the pitch were Chief Inspectors Beal and Sumner and Superintendent Greenwood. Certain supervisory officers were conspicuous by their absence. It was utter chaos."

This was changed to: "On the pitch were Chief Inspectors Beal and Sumner and Superintendent Greenwood."

For the record, there was cctv covering the terraces and the areas outside the ground. Also, and perhaps alarmingly, the police control box overlooked the Leppings Lane terrace. The controlling officer, David Duckinfield, had a birds-eye view of the crush and of the open spaces available in the side pens. When questioned by Graham Kelly, a short while after the incident started, he said that the fans were fighting. In other words, the controlling police officer lied about what was happening as it was happening.

Police pushing fans BACK INTO the madness

Below is a few pictures of a Liverpool fan Kevin Williams. Kevin was 15 years old and his death is just one of the 96. who carried Kevin into the gym, found a pulse, and carried out CPR - Kevin started to breathe, Kevin opened eyes, murmured "Mum" and died 4:06pm.

My Story

I was always mad on Liverpool, strangely enough me Dad wasn’t into footie and my younger brother was too young. Didn’t stop me harassing me mum & dad for a season ticket for me fourteenth birthday though. They knew I was a tomboy but I reckon they thought I would grow out of it. Amusingly enough no-one seemed to really bat an eyelid when I started to go the match on me own. I didn’t care that I had no-one to go with, off I trotted with me Season ticket (princely sum of £55)!

I didn’t grow out of it, I just loved it even more. Slowly they got used to it but as I was only fourteen they wouldn’t let me go to any Away games, fair do’s I suppose especially as I was a girl!

The first away game I ever went to was Hillsborough in ’88 I was 15, the ticket as I recall was £6 and £7 for the train. Me mum got me up at the crack of dawn and made me a packed lunch. Thought I was the bees knees, going all the way to Sheffield on me own. Can still remember the walk down Leppings Lane, seemed miles from the train station! That was the year I went to my first Wembley and shed me first tears as we lost to Wimbledon. I was in one of the side pens at Hillsborough in ’88, I remember looking across at the two pens behind the goal & thinking how chocca they were. Madness I thought as I was standing in acres of space, looking back now the exact same thing happened in ’89, why didn’t they see it coming?

When it came to ’89 I was beside myself with excitement, I was really friendly with one of the teachers in school, we used to have loads of banter about the footie. He was a bluenose and I remember us both leaving school on the Friday afternoon. I wanted them to win for a change. I was too young to go to the final in ’86 but this was my chance to go to Wembley and see an all Merseyside Cup Final. I didn’t go on the train that year, went on the coach from Picton Clock, Home James I think the firm was called. Me mum took me to the coach (even though I was 16 now)! I don’t remember too much about the journey except for two things that stand out, the first one that our coach for some reason went though Manchester and everyone started singing the Munich song. I joined in blindly not really appreciating that I was singing about a tragedy. The second thing was the coach got stopped and searched for alcohol on route. That seemed to hold us up quite a bit as I remember panicking about missing kick off.

Then began the start of a long nightmare, I remember vividly seeing so many people queuing up outside just a mass of fans not even really in a queue. I was really worried about missing kick off by now but that was the least of my worries. I just remember next that someone decided to shut these two outer gates, but they never just shut them they kind of pushed them shut and caused us to be crushed in between the turnstiles and the perimeter gates. I remember thinking I was in big trouble then I was really squashed, on my own, smaller than everyone else. I thought no-one could see me. I really thought I was gonna die OUTSIDE the ground. I suppose because people don’t talk about Hillsborough, myself included I never really knew if anyone else felt so crushed outside.

When they opened the gates the first time I remember thinking thank god. They only let a few through at first to relieve some of the outside pressure. I don’t blame the police for that not the lads on the ground anyway. Some of them were getting just as crushed as us, I remember them looking frightened and one of them saw me and put his arm round me. He asked me who I was with and when I said on my own he tried to keep hold of me and stop me getting crushed. He was young and frightened and yes he was a policeman but it was the men at the top who were to blame not him. I heard him on his radio pleading for some guidance from a senior officer; he didn’t know what to do. Then they opened the gates again, this time for longer and relieved we all piled straight down the tunnel.

The rest as we all know is history and I don’t want to talk about the horrors that I saw after that.

The reason for this post is to talk about the relief I felt when someone opened those gates, I felt relief while m fellow fans at the front were crushed to death. When Kelvin Mackenzie published his lies I believed some of them and I was there.

For years I thought it my fault. I really thought that I personally helped to kill the people at the front of those pens. I went back to school on the Monday and got special treatment from the teachers, but I felt a fraud. Here people were being nice to me and wondering if I was okay but they didn’t realise that I wanted to them to open those gates that I was alive and the people at the front were dead. I saw those pictures, the crushed faces against fences and I wept. I helped to crush those people.

That is what the lies and the cover up done to people like me, they made me believe that I was responsible. Nearly two years of counselling before I started to believe it wasn’t my fault.

People like Kelvin Mackenzie made me think I was a murderer, and if you are reading this you might think well you were there you knew the truth but I was sixteen, an innocent kid going to a footie match. I thought the papers wrote the truth, yeah I knew that some of it was wrong. But I didn’t know what to believe. Whose fault was it?

A young policeman helped me, so was it the fault of the police, so many questions.

It took me years to find and accept the answers, so to all the liars on that day especially Mackenzie I hope you are proud of yourselves because you made one tragedy into two. You made me believe I was responsible for those deaths when I wasn’t. You ruined my teenage years (although at least I was alive) but most of all you still after all these years cause me pain.

The difference?

I’m older, wiser and I know THE TRUTH.

JUSTICE FOR THE 96

YNWA

[Young £]

Three days after the tragedy, the Mirror had three reporters in Liverpool - the vastly experienced Syd Young (now retired), plus Christian Gysin (now with the Daily Mail) and Hay (now running a media consultancy in Scotland).

The London newsdesk called to alert them to copy that had been filed by Whites news agency in Sheffield that afternoon (here's a pdf copy of that). It made serious allegations against the Liverpool fans, claiming they had been drunk, had pick-pocketed victims and had urinated on policemen.

The trio were told by the newsdesk briefer that he had previously called the paper's two reporters in Sheffield - the late Ted Oliver and Frank Thorne (now freelancing in Australia) - with the same information. They had looked into it and rejected it as untrue.

They told the desk they could not stand up the allegations so they would not be filing. Oliver actually said that if such a story appeared under his byline he would resign.

So Young, Gysin and Hay made calls too and couldn't find any supporting evidence for the allegations. Indeed, all the indications they were getting suggested "the Yorkshire cops were trying to divert attention away from their own failings."

Hay told me: "We discussed it and, having agreed that we could not verify the claims, passed on [to the desk] our suspicions about the Yorkshire police spin."

He was full of praise for the response of the night news editor, the now-retired Mark Dowdney. Hay said: "Despite the pressures on him and the knowledge that others might run with the story, he sided with his men in the field and spiked the story."

Well, he didn't actually spike it. But the Mirror's extreme scepticism about the claims - properly reflecting the views of their five reporters in Sheffield and Liverpool - is clear from the angle the paper took, exemplified by the headline, "Fury as police claim victims were robbed." Very different, in other words, to "The truth".

http://www.guardian....edia/greenslade

The world didn't see footy fans as salt of the earth as much as scum of the earth. The point is that it could never happen today. These days, only 20 years later football and the football fan occupies a different place in society. If 96 members, of any other section of society died it would have been harder to manage a cover up as most of the bad press had already been done on the football fan. On top of that you have the scouse stereotype to reinforce it.

It's damning on so many levels.

1.11 On 11 July 1991 the Police Complaints Authority directed that the two officers with

overall command at Hillsborough, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield and his assistant,

Superintendent Bernard Murray, should face a disciplinary hearing to answer the charge of

‘neglect of duty’. C/Supt Duckenfield retired on medical grounds and in January 1992 it was

decided not to pursue a case against Supt Murray alone.

The cynic in me is wondering why the Tory government has waited until they are bang in the middle of their term-as far from elections at either side to preside over the release of this.

They've spun thus out in the first instance to cover up the police mistake and then bided their time until they'd got back into power to let the truth come back out.

Also a generation has passed so the top people are no longer in a position to tarnish the party image.

No-one will ever forget the 96

September 12, 2012|By Harry Harris, Football Correspondent

To have been at Hillsborough is not something I usually mention. I don't write about it, don't talk about it.

But on the day that the 96 are finally getting justice, it somehow feels right to relive the one football game I attended, among the many thousands, that cannot be forgotten.

Haunted is the best way to describe the feeling about it, having watched from the sanctuary of the press box the scenes that have been, and continue to be, a scar on the image of English football and indeed on English justice.

Haunted is the only way to describe the most nauseating, harrowing experience of more than 40 years in sports journalism. Of having a newspaper correspondent's "duty" to report on the Sheffield Wednesday indoor sports hall that doubled up as a resting place for the dead of Hillsborough.

The journey home was numb, the days in the offices of the Daily Mirror of post-event shock that culminated in an unprecedented rant at someone for nothing in particular.

The journey to the FA Cup semi-final on April 15 1989 was full of the usual banter, laughter and excitement of just doing the job of watching important football games with your friends, although my friends at that time happened to be a handful of fellow chief football writers on rival newspapers.

Being a non-driver all my life, I travelled to the game with Colin Gibson of the Daily Telegraph, Steve Curry of the Daily Express and Stuart Jones of the Times.

As we approached the stadium, we noticed the usual pre-match rituals of the fans; drinking in the pubs, spilling outside into the streets, all good-natured, good-humoured, but nothing you would want to nip over and join in. Being recognised was not pleasant at times, not in that era, and sometimes not even, in those days, at a football match.

It was impossible to imagine the events that would unfold up to 3.15pm and the scale of the loss of life.

That hit home when we visited the sports hall. It hit home on the journey away from the ground, listening to the endless news bulletins on the car radio, having gone through a reporter's duty of interviewing the people involved but hardly taking in the enormity of the consequences of what had just occurred.

My main recollection of all of that professional reporting was not really taking any of it in. A book full of notes, yes, but not really knowing what it all meant.

It was an emotion I had not experienced before, and have no wish to experience again.

If any good has come from Hillsborough, it was the Lord Justice Taylor Report, which transformed football in this country forever. No more terraces.

The all-seater stadia, with luxury boxes and hospitality, may have brought more billionaire foreigners, more wealth and more distance between the ordinary fan and the superstar footballer.

But it is now safe to go and watch the national sport at the highest level, when crowds are at their largest. So when I hear well-intentioned campaigners for limited areas of terracing, I can understand it but I cannot forget Hillsborough and my answer is no. No way.

Journalists didn't exactly have a good name in those days - even worse now, since the hacking scandal - but I felt absolutely gutted that the Sun claimed to have "The Truth" about what happened. Their report said the Liverpool fans were to blame, that many were drunk and had caused the crush of bodies in their panic to get into the game, that many were without tickets.

I couldn't help thinking that I was there and hadn't seen any of that. How could I have missed it? Or was it just not true?

What cannot ever be washed away is the pain and suffering of that day. No-one will ever forget it, certainly not anyone who happened to be there. That is impossible.

As for the blame: from the time I was leaving Hillsborough, it was pretty obvious to me who was to blame. It wasn't the fans. It wasn't the 96 who perished.

It has taken quite a while for the truth to emerge. Far too long.

We had a famous cartoonist at the Daily Mirror in those days, who drew a really heart-wrenching portrait of all the top clubs' biggest stars wearing their club strips and holding a banner that said: "You Will Never Walk Alone."

The sports editor presented that to me, and I still have it on the wall.

Yes, a poignant reminder. A reminder of a game I would love to forget but cannot. And no-one will ever forget the 96; certainly not me.

http://soccernet.esp....the-96?cc=3888

Hillsborough: Brian Reade on the day that changed football forever

Published 00:00 14/04/09 By

EMAIL YOUR MESSAGES OF SUPPORT TO THE HILLSBOROUGH FAMILIES TO [email protected]

English football is different today.

The stadiums are home to middle- class families watching pre- match entertainment from comfortable seats and corporate clients sipping chilled wine over three- course meals in plush boxes.

Potent symbols of the most lucrative brand in global sporting history. Twenty years ago our grounds didn't smell of wealth and fine cuisine but resentment, from fans fenced into crumbling terraces by law- makers who viewed them as an unruly mob.

Their potential for tribal violence, not their consumer rights, were uppermost in politicians' minds. Crowd control, not crowd safety, the guiding principles of police charged with keeping them in check.

In those decrepit sheds, many of which had changed little since the Victorians built them, a tragedy was waiting to happen.

It came on April 15, 1989, during an FA Cup semi- final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, when police lost control, opened an exit gate and allowed thousands of fans to enter, and stream unguided, into crowded pens. They then ignored the desperate pleas from those who were perishing behind 10ft high, spiked metal. It was Britain's worst sporting disaster and it changed football for ever.

An inquiry would demand all pitch- side fences were ripped out, seats put in and fans treated as human beings.

English football became a golden magnet for billionaire owners, millionaire players and satellite customers, drawn from every corner of the earth. But at what cost? Ninety- six people - half of whom were 21 or younger - lost their lives at Hillsborough, more than 750 were physically injured, numerous suicides have been laid at its door, and thousands still bear the mental scars.

The families fought long and hard for justice for their loved ones, but despite Lord Justice Taylor laying the blame squarely at the door of the police, not one person has lost a day's pay or a day's liberty. Two decades on the wounds are still raw.

Here is English football' s most harrowing and shameful story told by Brian Reade, the Mirror man who was there on the day and with the families throughout their elusive struggle for justice.

_______________

The morning could not have been more perfect. A cobalt blue sky, blood orange sun and a warm air filled with birdsong and blossom. Spring's optimism flooded Liverpudlian hearts.

It was the second year running we'd been drawn to play Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough and those of us in that red procession which snaked along the M62 to Sheffield had few worries about reaching Wembley again.

But different kinds of doubts were creeping in. Major roadworks, an accident and persistent police checks were causing delays, and fears spread that the kick-off might be missed.

On reaching Hillsborough those fears were realised. At 2.30pm, Leppings Lane, the entry point for all Liverpool fans, was human gridlock.

No police or stewards were on hand to filter the thousands of fans into queues.

The only visible authority was half-adozen forlorn figures in blue on horseback and a few on the ground, screaming at the swaying crowd to back away from the turnstiles. For the second year running, and despite protests, Liverpool were given 4,000 fewer tickets and the smaller end of the ground - despite having a much bigger following than Forest.

Geographically it made the police job of getting fans in and out of Sheffield easier.

Ensuring safety is how they termed it. It meant all 24,000 Liverpool ticket-holders, whether in Leppings Lane or the West and North stands, had to pass through 23 turnstiles, most so old they constantly jammed.

At the much newer Kop end Forest had 60 modern turnstiles. As the ground erupted with expectation at the entry of the teams, outside in Leppings Lane, there was pandemonium.

Fans, angry at the lack of movement and organisation, berated the police, some of whom were screaming into their radios for assistance. Many of us moved away from the turnstiles and looked on from a distance, convinced the kick-off would be put back while they sorted out the chaos.

Instead, at 2.52pm a huge blue exit gate opened and 2,000 of us poured in.

At the back of the Leppings Lane terrace, stewards who were supposed to be dispersing the supporters evenly into five pens had vanished. Consequently the bulk of fans ignored the lesser populated pens at the sides of the terrace and headed into the two central ones behind the goal, already over-crowded. Those at the front became packed tighter and tighter. The game was now under way and fans at the back, ignorant of the crush, concentrated on trying to get a view of the pitch.

They weren't to know that ahead of them on this shallow-sloping concrete there was panic, fear, hyper-ventilating, fainting, hair drenched in sweat and vomit matting on the metal fencing.

And death. Survivors speak of faces pushed against them that were wide-eyed and blue, of their bodies going numb and limp, and their minds suffering neardeath experiences. Eddie Spearritt, whose 14-year-old son Adam died in the crush, lost consciousness. He said: "They've said it was a surge but it wasn't. It was a slow, constant build-up of pressure, like a vice getting tighter and tighter until you couldn't breathe."

Fans screamed at passing police to open the perimeter gates but they walked on by. Some who tried to climb over the fence were battered back down. Others crawled on all fours above heads towards the back of the terrace and were hoisted to safety by fans in the stand above.

Despite the obvious density of the crowd, the screams, and the pain etched on the faces of the suffering - and despite CCTV cameras feeding these images back to the police control room - the perimeter gates remained locked.

When one was temporarily forced open by fans and a few spilled on to the pitch, the police thinking became clear.

Reinforcements moved in with dogs. They believed what they were seeing behind the cages was not innocents trapped in a killing field, but hooligans orchestrating a pitch invasion.

Goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, a couple of yards from the unfolding disaster, was one of the first to raise the alarm.

He said: " There were people with their faces pinned against the fence saying to me, ' Bruce, can you help me. We can't breathe'. So I asked a policewoman to open the gate and she said, ' We have to wait for our boss to give the word'."

By 3.04pm, when Liverpool striker Peter Beardsley crashed a shot against the bar causing a surge, many of the 96 had already lost their lives.

Some died standing up, of traumatic asphyxia. Others were crushed or trampled when a crash barrier gave way.

At 3.06pm after the police reinforcements had signalled the severity of the problem, the referee led both teams off.

The perimeter gates were opened and hundreds of seriously injured fans spilled on to the grass and collapsed, desperate for ambulances, stretchers and oxygen that never arrived.

The penalty area looked like a battlefield.

Between the bodies, casualties staggered around, dazed, confused, weeping.

Apart from a handful of St John ambulancemen, the only medical aid for the dying came from fellow fans.

They tried resuscitation and tore down advertising hoardings to ferry victims the length of the pitch to what quickly became a makeshift mortuary. Some policemen joined in. Others berated fans for ripping down the hoardings to make stretchers.

Dozens more police were drafted on to the pitch, not to help casualties but to form a wall across the half- way line to prevent rival fans getting at each other.

Clearly back in the control room the carnage was still being put down to hooliganism.

Half an hour after the players had left the pitch a solitary ambulance made its way slowly towards the Leppings Lane end. That even one made it was a minor miracle.

Tony Edwards, the only professional ambulanceman to reach the Leppings Lane end, recalled what happened outside the ground. He said: " A policeman came to my window and said, ' You can't go on the pitch, they 're still fighting'."

He went on nonetheless, but his job was made impossible by the scale of the casualties.

The memory of bodies being piled on to his ambulance, of people pleading with him to take their friends and loved ones, of the anarchy that made his job impossible, haunts him to this day.

But what haunts him most is the knowledge that he was the only paramedic trying to help. He said: "

There were 42 ambulances, including mine, waiting outside the stadium. That means 80- odd trained staff could have been inside the ground. They weren't allowed in because they were told there was fighting.

" But there was no fighting.

The survivors were deciding who was the priority, who we should deal with. The police weren't. We weren't .

Can you imagine a rail accident where all the ambulances wait on the embankment while survivors bring the casualties up?" Of the 94 who died that day ( 14- year- old Lee Nicol died four days later and 18- year- old Tony Bland had his life support machine turned off in March 1993) only 14 made it to hospital.

Trevor Hicks was one of the few who got a loved one into Tony Edwards' ambulance. He was trying to resuscitate his 19- year- old daughter Sarah when he spotted her 15- year- old sister Victoria being placed into the ambulance.

Trevor tried to push Sarah in alongside her but the bodies were piled high and he had to lay her back on the pitch.

He said: " The ambulance started to move away. I saw the door close and I had to make a decision in that split- second. I thought the fella with Sarah knows what he's doing, I'll leave her with him and another ambulance will be along in a minute."

Another one never came and both of his girls died. Trevor, now 63, added: " In the ambulance, I was sucking the vomit from Vicky's throat. I couldn't get rid of that taste for six months.

" A psychiatrist said I was either trying to hang on to the last contact with my daughters or it was guilt - I was punishing myself for not saving them .

" The hurt I suffered that day was so extreme I can't be hurt any more."

Outside the ground as we devastated fans made our way home grief turned to rage when word spread that we were being blamed for the disaster.

The FA's Chief Executive Graham Kelly, told the media that the policeman in charge, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, had accused us of kicking down an exit gate and flooding the terraces.

Duckenfield, in charge of his first big football match had given the order to open the gate without ensuring the thousands who entered Leppings Lane would be funnelled into the outside pens.

He had seen the over- crowding and suffering on the terraces on CCTV cameras with zoom facilities and done nothing. And when asked for an explanation he mouthed something he believed outsiders would buy.

A hooligan mob had stormed the stadium and killed their own.

It was a lie which would travel all the way around the world before it was corrected.

A calculated slur that would never go away.

Uefa President Jacques Georges picked up on Duckenfield's words and laid the blame squarely on the Liverpool fans.

He said: " They were beasts waiting to charge into the arena." When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher turned up at Hillsborough on the Sunday, she expressed her sympathy but little else.

However, her closest aide, Yorkshireman Sir Bernard Ingham, was blaming a " tankedup mob".

This was the line now being peddled by SouthYorkshire Police as the enormity of their culpability hit home.

Before a single corpse had been buried the second Hillsborough tragedy was under way. The cover- up.

A Sheffield news agency and Tory MP Irvine Patnick, were fed lies by an unnamed

Police Federation official and soon a fantasy tale, copper- bottomed by officialdom, was in the public domain.

Hordes of Liverpool hooligans had turned up drunk and ticketless and caused mayhem outside the ground leaving police with no option but to open the gate.

As brave emergency service workers battled to save lives, the yobs abused them in the vilest of manner and stole from the dead.

The Establishment was putting a classic smear on the fans to duck the blame for almost 100 deaths and so low did the public hold football followers back then, it swallowed it.

One man in particular, Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, made a terrible miscalculation.

Under the headline THE TRUTH he cleared the front page to tell the world: " Some fans picked pockets of victims. Some fans urinated on the brave cops. Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life."

The words that accompanied it claimed that " drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims" and " police officers, firemen and ambulance crews were punched, kicked and urinated upon".

One anonymous copper was even quoted as saying that a dead girl had been abused, while fans " were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead".

With Merseyside still trying to come to terms with the enormity of the tragedy and families making arrangements for burying their dead, it felt like a knife being forced deeper and deeper.

Scousers, regardless of their football leanings, were apoplectic. To accuse them of killing their own was bad enough but to state as fact that they picked the pockets of the dying was a call to arms.

Overnight thousands of copies of The Sun were destroyed. There were public burnings.

Delivery men refused to touch it, shopkeepers refused to stock it. The boycott is still observed by the vast majority of Merseysiders to this day.

In 20 years, not one witness has come forward to back up any of those allegations. Not one image has been unearthed from thousands of photographs and hours of film to vindicate the slurs.

That's because they were outright lies.

Behind the scenes police were attempting to harden up the case of the drunken, ticketless mob.

Fans, including myself, were interviewed by West Midlands CID, who were charged with finding out the causes of the disaster.

But the main thrust of their questions was how much people had drunk before the game and whether anyone travelling with them did so without a ticket. Bereaved parents told how, when they arrived in Sheffield on the night of April 15, their dead children were being treated as suspects in a criminal investigation.

All were asked how much their loved ones had had to drink.

It later turned out every corpse had been tested for alcohol content, with small amounts or nothing found in all of them.

But why had it suddenly become a crime to have a drink before a sporting event or turn up ticketless in the hope of buying one off a tout? Were they implying you'd never see that at Wimbledon, Twickenham or a Rod Stewart concert? Of course many fans had been drinking before the game and some turned up without tickets .

It had happened every year at FA Cup semi- finals. Why suddenly, at this particular game, did police decide that doing either made you a potential murderer? Amid the slurs and questions, Liverpool was trying to come to terms with its grief. The day after the disaster people drifted towards Anfield seeking a focal point for their mourning.

The club's chief executive Peter Robinson opened the ground and the Kop and its goalmouth, became a shrine to the dead.

Within days, a third of the pitch would be blanketed with flowers, scarves of all colours from followers of different clubs and heart- felt messages of support from around the world.

The players became social workers, sometimes attending half-a- dozen funerals a day. Striker John Aldridge said: " It hit me very, very hard. To the point where I couldn't cope.

"It weakened me physically, emotionally and mentally. The thought of training never entered my head. I remember trying to go jogging but I couldn't run. There was a time when I wondered if I would ever muster the strength to play. I was learning about what was relevant in life."

He did go back to playing though, and three weeks later, scored twice against

Nottingham Forest to knock them out of the re- scheduled semi-final .

Liverpool went on to win the FA Cup in an emotional final against neighbours Everton. But many believe the fact that the competition wasn't abandoned that year was yet another insult to the dead.

As spring turned to summer there was little to extinguish the pain and anger among Liverpudlians. Until August 4, when the late Lord Justice Taylor published his interim report into the disaster and finally the truth was heard.

And it was the complete opposite of the lies being peddled by certain people in Yorkshire and Wapping.

He ruled that drunkenness, late arrivals and fans turning up without tickets were red herrings. That there was no evidence of any kind of hooliganism and that fans were not to blame for the crush. He even described their role in trying to save the dying as " magnificent".

Instead, Lord Taylor laid the blame squarely at the door of the police.

He highlighted their planning failure which allowed " dangerous congestion at the turnstiles" and ruled that " the immediate cause of the disaster was gross overcrowding, namely the failure, when the exit gate was opened, to cut off access to the central pens which were already overfull.

" They were overfull because no safe maximum capacities had been laid down, no attempt was made to control entry to individual pens numerically and there was no effective visual monitoring of crowd density."

He hit out at the police's " sluggish reaction and response when the crush occurred" and claimed that the total number of fans who entered the Leppings Lane terrace " did not exceed the capacity of the standing area".

So much for the thousands of ticketless fans theory.

And he lambasted Chief Supt Duckenfield who he said " froze" after ordering the exit gate to be opened .

" A blunder of the first magnitude," he called it.

Taylor's report not only vindicated the fans but gave hope to the bereaved families that they would receive justice. That the people into whose care they had entrusted their loved ones would face up to their responsibilities for allowing a wholly avoidable disaster to happen. But their hope was shortlived.

The inquests, held before a Sheffield jury, and a coroner who was in the pay of Sheffield Council ( themselves culpable for not issuing Hillsborough with a valid safety certificate) delivered verdicts of accidental death. The coroner had imposed a 3.15pm cut- off time, claiming that every victim would have been brain- dead by then and ruling out any evidence relating to events after it.

It automatically hauled the emergency services off the hook, making it that much harder to prove there had been criminal neglect. The DPP threw out all charges against the police on grounds of insufficient evidence. No senior officer was prosecuted and a disciplinary case against Duckenfield was stopped when he took early retirement at 46 on medical grounds, with a full pension.

No legal, moral or financial compensation came the families' way. The majority receiving little more than funeral expenses.

In contrast, 14 police officers who were " traumatised" by what they saw that day picked up £ 1.2million.

Astonishingly, their claims for compensation were based on the insurers accepting that their superiors had been negligent.

However, there was a momentum gathering behind the belief that a major miscarriage of justice had taken place. Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern was commissioned by Granada TV to tell the families' stories in a two- hour drama- documentary.

Researchers unearthed new evidence which undermined the police case, crucially that the CCTV camera trained on the Leppings Lane end, which they said had not been in operation, was working.

The ground engineer swore an affidavit to that effect which proved South Yorkshire Police had been lying when they told the inquest they couldn't see the extent of the crush from the control box.

This could not have been challenged at the inquests because, mysteriously, the CCTV tapes from the day were " stolen" and never found.

On December 5 1996, Hillsborough was back on the front pages of a national newspaper. This time The Mirror splashed with a headline THE REAL TRUTH urging every reader to watch McGovern's drama.

The Mirror's phone lines were swamped with angry readers demanding justice - 25,695 adding their names to the paper's petition calling on the Attorney General to launch a new inquiry. ithin weeks of Labour winning power in 1997 Home Secretary Jack Straw appointed Lord Justice Stuart- Smith to scrutinize the new evidence to see if it merited a fresh public inquiry.

Once again the families believed justice would soon be delivered. But within minutes of meeting Stuart- Smith they knew they were walking into the latest brick wall.

When there was a delay at the start of proceedings, due to the absence of some family members, Stuart- Smith turned to Phil Hammond, who lost his son Philip in the disaster, and said: " Are they like the Liverpool fans, turning up at the last minute?"

The Lord Justice cross- examined nobody and studied the evidence in private. And despite discovering that 183 police statements had been edited to remove criticism of senior police management, he ruled there was not enough evidence to merit a fresh inquiry..

By now the families were running short of stamina and options but still they fought on.

They took out private prosecutions against Duckenfield and his deputy on the day, Supt Bernard Murray, who went on trial at Leeds crown court in July 2000 charged with manslaughter and wilful neglect of duty.

But once again justice eluded them. Murray was cleared of all charges and when the jury failed to reach a verdict on Duckenfield the judge halted the trial, cleared him, and ruled there could be no retrial.

This was their last collective shot at justice. It ended with eight armed police officers escorting the families out of the court building. Presumably in case they caused trouble.

Eleven years after their loved ones lost their lives for being viewed as a problem they ended their legal fight in the exact same way. But they'd battled their hearts out for some vague notion of justice. For the belief that when you bring children into this world, the facts on the birth certificate are accurate.

And when they leave, the least you can do for them is put the true facts on their death certificate.

Jimmy McGovern said: " All the families ever wanted was for someone to put their hands up and be accountable for the deaths of their loved ones.

"But no one has said sorry. Now that runs contrary to basic human instincts. If we bump into each other, we both say ' Sorry'. It's a basic human response.

"But not in tragedies of this scale. They can't say sorry. It implies liability. That's why the families kept on fighting." And those of us who walked through that opened Leppings Lane gate 20 years ago tomorrow and have felt guilty ever since for coming home alive owe them.

For seeking truth in the face of vicious lies and prejudice. For fighting for the memory of people whose only crime was being naive enough to turn up at, supposedly, one of the country's finest football grounds in the belief that their safety was paramount in the eyes of those charged with their care.

If you are a football fan you should remember them when you look around today's affluent, cage- free, well- stewarded, all- seater stadiums.

You should remember the agony they went through in the first Hillsborough Disaster and the suffering their families went through in the second one.

And you should never forget that for English football's bright tomorrow they gave their todays.

RIP the 96

[Kompressor]

Only thing I was wondering when the truth came out was, does this in some way justify The Sun newspaper's headline.

Obviously it's still a very shitty paper and any decent person wouldn't bother with it, however seeing as their headline took it's lead from the words of the police force on hand on the day,

A police force that should've been trustworthy enough to tell the truth from the off.