• Leak reveals what Merseyside police told
government
• Bulk of documents to be made public later this year
Margaret Thatcher
was informed by an unnamed senior Merseyside police officer that
"drunken Liverpool fans" were
to blame for causing the Hillsborough
disaster, according to
confidential government documents leaked to the BBC.
The official inquiry into the disaster at the 1989 FA Cup
semi-final which left 96 fans dead ruled it was caused by a failure
in crowd control by South Yorkshire police.
Previously secret government and police documents relating to
the disaster are being reviewed by the Hillsborough Independent
Panel, set up in 2009, but they are not expected to be made
available to the families of those who died or to the public until
the autumn.
However, among the leaked documents is a letter sent to the then
prime minister from a member of her policy unit in Downing Street
four days after the disaster, which details a different initial
version of events put forward by the chief constable of Merseyside
police, the late Sir Kenneth Oxford, and some of his senior
colleagues in the immediate aftermath.
According to the letter, made public by the BBC Radio 4's The
World at One, the Merseyside chief constable told officials: "A key
factor in causing the disaster was the fact that large numbers of
Liverpool fans had turned up without tickets. This was getting lost
sight of in attempts to blame the police, the football authorities,
etc."
The letter went on to report that a senior member of the
Merseyside police directly blamed supporters: "One officer, born
and bred in Liverpool, said that he was deeply ashamed to say that
it was drunken Liverpool fans who had caused this disaster, just as
they had caused the deaths at Heysel." This officer is not
named.
The documents also report that the chief constable "deplored the
press's morbid concentration on pictures of bodies. He was also
uneasy about the way in which Anfield was being turned into a
shrine."
Sheila Coleman, from the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, told the
BBC: "We are really concerned that the emphasis is totally on
Merseyside police here and not on South Yorkshire police, and that
makes us very suspicious of how this information was leaked.
"We find it a strange coincidence that this information was
leaked only days after we found out the [Hillsborough Independent]
panel are not going to report until the autumn."