28 June 2017•Update: 28 June 2017
By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal
LONDON
British prosecutors have decided to charge six individuals Wednesday, over the 1989 Hillsborough disaster that killed 96 football fans in a football game stampede.
U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said there is sufficient evidence to charge them with “criminal offences.”
"Following our careful review of the evidence, in accordance with the Code for Crown Prosecutors, I have decided that there is sufficient evidence to charge six individuals with criminal offences,” Sue Hemming, Head of the CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division said.
New inquests into the 1989 disaster at the Liverpool-Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final match in Sheffield concluded the fans had been “unlawfully killed”.
Former chief superintendent David Duckenfield, who was the match commander on the day of disaster, will be charged with the manslaughter of 95 people by gross negligence.
He does not face prosecution due to legal reasons for the 96th victim who died four years later, according to the CPS.
The public prosecutors will allege that Duckenfield’s failure to fulfill personal responsibilities on the day was “extraordinarily bad and contributed substantially to the deaths of each of those 96 people who so tragically and unnecessarily lost their lives”, Hemming, who was speaking in Warrington with victims’ family members, said.
The other individuals, who are facing charges, are the then officials of Sheffield Wednesday football club Graham Henry Mackrell and Peter Metcalf, and three former officers from South Yorkshire police Donald Denton, Alan Foster and Norman Bettison.
“There was insufficient evidence to prosecute senior staff from the ambulance service and to bring a case against the Football Association (FA),” Hemming said.
95 people were killed or fatally injured on 15 April 1989 in Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium when a stampede crushed Liverpool fans after one of the gates into the stadium was opened in a crowd-easing measure to let people pour into already crowded stands.
The coroner’s inquest in 1991 ruled the deaths were accidental; however, the second inquest in 2016 said the fans were “unlawfully killed.”
