The UK’s junior justice minister, 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 supporters died at an FA Cup semi-final 20 years ago today.
Eagle, member of parliament 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 for the disaster away from the force and lay it on Liverpool supporters instead.
She based the accusation on the discovery that dozens of statements by junior police officers about the circumstances of the disaster had been amended after being vetted by senior officers.
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” and that there was “another unit headed by a detective chief inspector” that was “logging in and logging out the statements.”
Eagle asked publicly who was in that unit and what it was doing, but says she has never received an answer to that question.
“I said there was a black propaganda campaign, involved in a conspiracy to cover up, and I do not retreat from those words at all,” she said. “Lord Justice Taylor saw through it and in his official report he pinned the blame for the disaster firmly on the police. But at the inquest, the police presented that view again, blaming anybody but themselves, and the families felt that it worked.”
“It is still an anguish to the families to know that this process went on and even now the police should come clean, tell us who was in the unit which vetted the statements, what was the unit headed by the DCI [detective chief inspector] doing, who changed the statements, and who supervised the process,” she said. “If that were accompanied by a genuine apology and a human approach, it could go some way to healing the wounds borne by the families.”
The police statements, including those that 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, although he criticized the deletion of officers’ comments in a small number of statements. Eagle also complains that the documents were “dumped in the library, with no covering letter and no evidence that everything was there.”
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of