Bereaved Hillsborough families have reacted with outrage to the not guilty verdict delivered in the prosecution for manslaughter of the former South Yorkshire police chief superintendent David Duckenfield, who was in command of the 1989 FA Cup semi-final at which 96 people were fatally injured.

The verdict followed a 30-year campaign for justice by the families, which in 2012 led to the quashing of the original 1991 inquest and its verdict of accidental death, and a new legal process.

Margaret Aspinall, chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, whose son James, 18, was one of the 96 people who received fatal injuries at the semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on 15 April 1989, said after the verdict: “I blame a system that’s so morally wrong within this country, that’s a disgrace to this nation.”

The jury at the retrial at Preston crown court returned a not guilty verdict by a 9-1 majority after three full days of deliberation. Duckenfield, who the judge, Sir Peter Openshaw, had allowed to sit in the courtroom rather than the dock throughout, to make allowances for his medical conditions including post traumatic stress disorder, was hugged after the verdict by his wife, Ann, who supported him at the court throughout the trial.

Christine Burke, one of three siblings whose father, Henry Burke, 47, was killed at Hillsborough 30 years ago, stood up sobbing after the verdict. She cried out to the judge that, as 96 people had been unlawfully killed according to the 2016 verdict of the new inquest: “I want to know who is responsible for the death of my father, because somebody was.”

Openshaw did not respond; he addressed the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) barrister Christine Agnew QC, told her there were “matters to sort out”, and the court was cleared. Read more

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