Why Justice Needs to be Served for Hillsborough Families

For many soccer fans this week, the last thing on our minds will be the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup matches. Instead, many supporters will be remembering the events of 20 years ago when 96 people tragically died at Hillsborough Stadium due to mistakes made by the police who were unable to control the crowd.

Remarkably, there are still so many unanswered questions 20 years after the tragic day of April 15, 1989 when Liverpool played Nottingham Forest in a FA Cup semi-final held at Hillsborough, Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium. Not only are there unanswered questions, but there is also the feeling that justice has not been served and that the truth of what happened on that fateful day has been withheld.

Luckily, there is one investigative journalist in England who is commited to getting to the facts and that’s David Conn of The Guardian. In his article today entitled “Families Fight to Force Police to Acknowledge Cover-Up Over Statements,” Conn shares many of the controversial facts regarding what happened that day as well as the police cover-up (and black propaganda) that allegedly occurred to ensure that the high-ranking police officers weren’t held responsible for their mistakes that day.

Rather than dwell on the information about Hillsborough that has already been reported, Conn interviews the current chief constable of the South Yorkshire police and asks him some very pointed questions (see video):

Other than bringing unanswered Hillsborough tragedy questions to light, Conn’s greatest achievement in his article is getting the chief constable to agree to trigger a review to see if there are any other documents held by South Yorkshire Police which can be made public.

Hopefully chief constable Meredydd Hughes will be able to find more documentation to reveal what really happened behind the scenes of the worst football tragedy ever to happen in British football. It’s time for more investigations to be made to discover what really happened that day, to find out the extent of the police cover-up and to serve justice to those who were responsible for such catatrosphic mistakes.

In The Times, meanwhile, they’ve opened up their archives and made available all of the articles that were published after the Hillsborough tragedy. The paper has also published an excellent PDF guide of how the Hillsborough disaster unfolded.