workingclasshistory:

On this day, 15 April 1989, the Hillsborough disaster took place during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest when a crush occurred after police directed fans into overcrowded areas, resulting in 96 dead and over 700 injured.
Though it was caused by police negligence and a ground which did not adequately meet health and safety standards, the police and the Conservative government, with help from the mainstream media, concocted an entirely false story blaming working class Liverpool fans for the disaster. The right-wing tabloid Sun newspaper falsely claimed that Liverpool fans robbed the dead, urinated on police and attacked officers who were trying to save lives.
After years of campaigning by the families of the victims, eventually in 2012 the truth finally came to light, with the Hillsborough Independent Panel determining that the primary cause of the disaster was a “lack of police control”. They also revealed that police had doctored 164 witness statements, that Conservative MP Irvine Patnick had passed lies from the police to the press. The police also went to extreme lengths in their attempts shift responsibility to the victims, even testing the blood of dead children for alcohol to try to blame them for their own deaths.
New inquests held in 2016 also found that the crush was caused by police, exacerbated by stadium defects. They determined that the senior police officer responsible breached his duty of care and that this amounted to gross negligence. They determined that the 96 victims were unlawfully killed.
To this day, many people in Liverpool still boycott The Sun.
Pictured: fans on upper tiers of the stadium help others escape the crush https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1694602854058191/?type=3