LONDON — More than a quarter century ago, 96 Liverpool soccer fans were crushed and trampled to death at an English soccer match, a tragedy that convulsed Britain and shocked the world, even as police and safety officials blamed victims for causing their own deaths.
On Tuesday, a jury found that the fans who died during the match atHillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, had been “unlawfully killed” and the victims of what proved to be fatal police mistakes, a verdict that represented a long-sought victory for family members who had fought for a full accounting.
The jury answered yes to the crucial questions of whether there were errors or omissions by the police in planning and executing security for the match on April 15, 1989, and it specifically cited the actions of commanding officers.
The victims suffocated as they entered an F.A. Cup semifinal between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest after the police opened an exit gate in an effort to relieve congestion outside the stadium before the game. In the chaos that ensued, some victims were crushed against steel fencing. Others were trampled, and more than 700 people were injured. The victims were ages 10 to 67 and included 37 teenagers.
The jury was given 14 yes-or-no questions in deciding how the 96 people died, and it said no to only one: whether the fans were responsible for the deaths.
Together, the findings amounted to an unambiguous rejection of a narrative pushed for many years by the police and some in the news media that portrayed the fans as drunk and out of control.
After the verdict was announced, family members clasped hands outside the coroner’s court in Warrington, England, east of Liverpool, and sang the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the tune that Liverpool fans belt out at every game. Some held photographs of their dead relatives. Others sobbed.
“The story of Hillsborough,” the statement said, “is a story of human tragedy, but it is also a story of deceit and lies, of institutional defensiveness defeating truth and justice.”
Senior police and safety officials had initially blamed the victims for causing their own deaths, which an independent inquiry later called “the most serious tragedy in U.K. sporting history.”
The events on that day changed how the game is watched: Standing-only sections at stadiums that were vulnerable to overcrowding have been replaced by seating areas at most venues in Britain, and fences around the field were removed.
“I want them 96 to rest in peace now, because they have suffered for these 27 years seeing the families suffer,” said Margaret Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son, James, died in the crush and who leads the Hillsborough Family Support Group.
“They done nothing wrong that day,” she told Granada Reports, a regional news program for North West England. “They were the heroes.”
Prime Minister David Cameron said the verdict had delivered justice that was long overdue.
David Duckenfield, the South Yorkshire police officer who was in charge of security for the game, later falsely claimed that spectators had opened the gate.
Video Families of the 96 victims in the 1989 soccer stadium disaster sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” after a jury ruling against the police. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish DateApril 26, 2016. Photo by Dave Thompson/Getty Images. Watch in Times Video »Families Sing After Hillsborough Ruling
The inquest was not a criminal trial, and it does not confer civil damages or penalties; rather, it is a finding of fact. After the verdict, however, the Crown Prosecution Service said it was evaluating whether to press charges in light of the findings, and legal experts said that such a case would most likely focus on Mr. Duckenfield.
During the inquest, Mr. Duckenfield described how he “froze” during the vital moments when police officers responded to the overcrowding threat and did not foresee that his failure to close a tunnel leading to crowded pens after a large exit gate was opened would prove fatal.
In the days after the deaths, efforts by the police to assign responsibility to soccer fans culminated in a story in the British newspaper The Sun under the headline “The Truth.” It blamed Liverpool fans for bad behavior and said they had attacked rescue workers, urinated on police officers and picked victims’ pockets.
The Sun’s editor at the time, Kelvin MacKenzie, apologized more than 23 years later.
In 1996, a former spokesman for Margaret Thatcher, who had been prime minister at the time of the stadium deaths, wrote a letter to Graham Skinner, a Liverpool fan whose friend had died in the crush, blaming the fans.
“I believe that there would have been no Hillsborough disaster if tanked-up yobs had not turned up in very large numbers to try to force their way into the ground,” wrote the spokesman, Bernard Ingham.
Mr. Duckenfield, who is now 71, left the police force at the age of 46 and retired to the south coast, where, according to the British news media, he largely disappeared from public view.
Chief Constable David Crompton of the South Yorkshire Police toldreporters on Tuesday that he unequivocally accepted the verdict of “unlawful killing.” He apologized to the families of the victims, saying that the force had handled events at Hillsborough “catastrophically wrong.”
The verdict, which capped the longest case heard by a jury in British legal history, comes more than two years after the inquest began, on April 1, 2014.
During the inquest, the jurors — six women and three men — were asked to answer the 14 questions related to how and when the victims had died, and they concluded that the fans’ behavior did not cause or contribute to the disaster.
The jurors working through the questions had unanimously agreed on answers to all of them, save for the matter of whether the victims were unlawfully killed. The jury voted seven to two on that question.
A new inquest into the disaster was ordered after an independent panel concluded in September 2012 that there had been a vast cover-up in which senior police officers sought to dissemble blame by making scapegoats of victims and survivors.
In December of that year, a high court in London overturned the original inquest verdicts of accidental death.
The independent panel’s report, citing post-mortem examinations, said the coroner had assigned an arbitrary time of death for 41 victims, even as their hearts and lungs continued to function. Some members of the victims’ families fainted when they read the report.
When the 2012 report was published, Mr. Cameron issued a government apology to the families of the victims, saying that they had suffered a double injustice.
“The injustice of the appalling events, the failure of the state to protect their loved ones and the indefensible wait to get to the truth,” and “the injustice of the denigration of the deceased — that they were somehow at fault for their own deaths.”
The Hillsborough tragedy culminated a dark decade for English soccer. Fifty-six people were killed when a fire raced through the stands during a Bradford City soccer match on May 11, 1985. Less than three weeks later, 39 people were crushed to death at Heysel Stadium in Brussels before the start of the European Cup final between Liverpool and the Italian club Juventus.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to David Duckenfield. He was the South Yorkshire officer in charge of security for the match in 1989, not the chief of police.
