UK apologizes to families of 97 soccer fans killed in 1989 stadium crush

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The British government apologized Wednesday to the families of 97 Liverpool soccer fans killed in a stadium crush 34 years ago for its delay in responding to a 2017 report meant to ensure the official cover-up in that case isn't repeated in other tragedies.

Six years after the report highlighted the "burning injustice" families faced in the wake of the tragedy, the government said it is introducing a charter, among other measures, aimed at preventing cover-ups of missteps by police or other public authorities.

However, it refused to back calls from campaigners to legally require public bodies, including police, to tell the truth and proactively cooperate with official investigations and inquiries into disasters.

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The Hillsborough disaster unfolded on April 15, 1989, when more than 2,000 Liverpool fans were allowed to flood into a standing-room section behind a goal at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield with the 54,000-capacity stadium already nearly full for a match against Nottingham Forest. The victims were smashed against metal anti-riot fences or trampled underfoot, and many suffocated.

An original inquest in 1991 recorded verdicts of accidental death, which the families of the victims refused to accept. Those verdicts were overturned in 2012 after a far-reaching inquiry into the disaster that examined previously secret documents and exposed wrongdoing and mistakes by police. In 2016, a jury found the victims were "unlawfully killed."

With hooliganism rife in English soccer throughout the 1980s, there were immediate attempts to assign blame on