For years the families of victims of
the Hillsborough stadium disaster have been searching for justice,
looking to uncover a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Now new inquests
have concluded the 96 victims were unlawfully killed.
Tapping phones. Doctoring evidence. Intimidating witnesses.
Not the sort of thing you expect of the authorities in modern-day Britain. But ask the families of those who died at Hillsborough, and they'll tell you that's exactly what has happened.
For years they weren't believed. Even treated as paranoid.
There have been inquiries, investigations and inquests, but for more than a quarter of a century the families have fought to separate truth from myth.
The disaster
Andrew Brookes and Henry Burke never met. One was a car worker from Bromsgrove, the other a roofing contractor from Liverpool. Andrew was 26 and single; Henry was 47, and a father of three.Both men had a passion for Liverpool Football Club. From the Midlands and from Merseyside, they each followed their team to Sheffield, to watch the Reds play Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final. And so it was that, on 15 April 1989, they came to be standing yards away from each other inside Pen Three on the Leppings Lane terrace at the Hillsborough ground.
It was a glorious day. The prize for the winning team - a trip to Wembley for the FA Cup Final.
It was the third consecutive time that the Football Association had chosen Hillsborough to stage a semi-final. The year before, the same two teams had played each other there at the same stage of the competition.
Andrew Brookes and Henry Burke made the journey to Sheffield with 24,000 other Liverpool supporters from all over the country.
The problems began outside the ground, as the numbers waiting to get in built up. The Liverpool fans had access to fewer than half the number of turnstiles that the Forest supporters did.
With the crowd pressure at the Leppings Lane entrance growing, the officer in charge of that area radioed for the wide exit gates to be opened. At 14:52 the match commander, Ch Supt David Duckenfield, gave the order for that to happen. More than 2,000 Liverpool supporters flooded through exit gate "C" in five minutes.
They headed down the central tunnel which led to the standing terraces that were divided into fenced pens. The two pens directly behind the goal were already full. The crush which developed quickly became fatal. Neither Andrew Brookes nor Henry Burke would escape.
When Andrew died, his sister Louise was 17. Henry's daughter Christine was 23. The women would never have met, but for their common bereavement. Now they consider themselves "Hillsborough sisters".
Louise Brookes says that after 27 years the women are "like family but without the genes". She has also become close to Donna Miller, who lost her 19-year-old brother Paul Carlile, a plasterer from Kirkby on Merseyside.
"The bonds we've formed are unique," says Louise. "We do laugh and wonder 'what would our loved ones think?'"
She adds that together they've had to "fight tooth and nail" for their relatives.
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