BRITAIN’S JUNIOR minister for justice, Maria Eagle, has said that South Yorkshire police should “come clean” about what she described as a “conspiracy to cover up” the force’s culpability for the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool FC supporters died at an FA Cup semi-final, 20 years ago this week.
Ms Eagle, MP for Liverpool Garston, where three of the bereaved families lived, accused South Yorkshire police in parliament in 1998 of having operated “a black propaganda campaign”, to deflect blame from the force and lay it on Liverpool supporters.
She based that accusation on the discovery that dozens of statements made by junior police officers about the circumstances of the disaster had been amended after being vetted by more senior officers.
She described this as “a systematic attempt to change police statements to emphasise the slant on the defence that the police wanted to develop”.
Ms Eagle named six senior South Yorkshire police officers of the time whose role, she said, was to “orchestrate that campaign”.
One of the officers named was Norman Bettison, who, when he was subsequently appointed chief constable of Merseyside police, denied any role in any such campaign. He said instead that after Hillsborough he worked in a unit whose functions included “making some sense of what happened on the day for the chief constable and his team”.
Mr Bettison said that the unit had no responsibility for processing police statements. He said there was “another unit headed by a detective chief inspector” which was “logging in and logging out the statements”.
Ms Eagle asked publicly who was in that unit and what it was doing, but says she has never received an answer to that question, or to any of those she asked in parliament.
The police statements, including those which had been amended, were placed by South Yorkshire police in the House of Commons library after the 1997 judicial scrutiny by Lord Justice Stuart-Smith. He concluded the changing of statements was not a cover-up, but he criticised the deletion of officers’ comments in a small number of statements.
Margaret Aspinall, of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, said this was still “a big issue” for the families.
"It is quite obvious the police wanted to cover up and accuse everybody else. If they gave us the whole truth now, and are accountable for what they did, it might alleviate some of the pain and hurt we have gone through for 20 years." – ( Guardianservice)