6 charged in 1989 stadium tragedy

LONDON — British prosecutors charged a former senior police officer with manslaughter Wednesday as they announced the first criminal cases in the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster, which left 96 people dead — many of them crushed against metal fences — and changed English soccer forever.

The families of the victims have waged a decades-long quest to seek justice for their loved ones, who they believed were unfairly blamed in the April 15, 1989, tragedy. The deaths initially were ruled accidental — a ruling overturned in 2012 after a new, wide-ranging inquiry.

Last year new inquests found that the 96 fans had been unlawfully killed. Files were sent to prosecutors to consider criminal charges and they announced their highly anticipated decision Wednesday.

Those charged were David Duckenfield, the police commander on the day; Norman Bettison, the former chief of South Yorkshire Police; Graham Henry Mackrell, the secretary and safety officer for the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club; Peter Metcalf, the attorney for the South Yorkshire Police; Donald Denton, former chief superintendent; and former Detective Chief Inspector Alan Foster.

The tragedy at the stadium in Sheffield unfolded when more than 2,000 Liverpool soccer fans flooded into a standing-room section behind a goal, with the 54,000capacity stadium already nearly full for the match against Nottingham Forest. The victims were smashed against metal anti-riot fences or trampled underfoot. Many suffocated in the crush.

The original inquest recorded verdicts of accidental death. But the families pressed for a new inquiry. They succeeded in getting the verdicts overturned in 2012 after a far-reaching inquiry that examined previously secret documents and found wrongdoing and mistakes by police.