It wasn’t their fault.

The 96 soccer fans who were trampled to death during an April 15, 1989, match in Sheffield, England, died because of poor crowd control by police and because the city’s emergency ambulance service botched its response as the tragedy unfolded, according to an exhaustive 395-page British government report released Wednesday.

“It’s a huge day in the history of football in this country,” said David Hall, editor of the soccer magazine FourFourTwo. “People have been fighting for 23 years to prove that the fans weren’t responsible and now they are vindicated. They were campaigning for the truth and today they got it.”

For years, families of those killed at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium in one of soccer’s most infamous incidents had fought to clear their names after some media reports claimed many of those killed had been drunk at the game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

The report released Wednesday concluded that authorities in Sheffield knew in advance that the soccer stadium ground was unsafe; that police doctored as many as 116 of 164 official police statements to remove mentions of “chaos” and “panic;” and that as many as 41 people were unconscious for a “significant” period and could have been revived with proper medical attention.

Police were ordered to avoid writing anything “which would give rise to the assumption that complete control had been lost.”

Alcohol, the report concluded, played no part in the deaths.

“What was new and a shock to us was how many of them could have been saved,” said Margaret Aspinall, chairwoman of the Hillsborough Families Support Group and mother of a victim. “I’ll go home and think about that and was James one of them.”

Prosecutors may pursue criminal charges against public organizations, such as the police, or individuals.

An initial inquest into the deaths in 1991 concluded that the victims died as a result of “accidental death.” Other early inquiries concluded there was a failure of crowd control outside the overcrowded stadium. But none had access to classified documents and victims’ families complained of a coverup.

A previous U.K. government agreed that a new independent panel should examine those documents. It reviewed more than 450,000 pages’ worth.

“On behalf of the government, and indeed our country, I am profoundly sorry for this double injustice that has been left uncorrected for so long,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament. “It was wrong that the families have had to wait for so long and fight so hard just to get to the truth. And it was wrong that the police changed the records of what happened and tried to blame the fans.”

In one example cited by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, a police constable named Maxwell Groome wrote in his report: “It was noticeable that the only supervisory officers above the rank of Inspector on the pitch were Chief Inspectors Beal and Sumner and Superintendent Greenwood. Certain supervisory officers were conspicuous by their absence. It was utter chaos.”

But Groome’s report was later changed to: “On the pitch were Chief Inspectors Beal and Sumner and Superintendent Greenwood.”

The panel’s report also criticized the response of ambulance services — only 16 victims were taken to hospital by a single ambulance that was allowed onto the field — and condemned the move by police to test the blood alcohol level of those who had died.

“The police and government at the time blamed it on drunken yobs and used that as a ‘get-out’ clause to cover up their complete lack of control of the situation,” Hall said. “To me, one of the most alarming things was how they took blood samples from those who died, including children, as if that would show they deserved to die because they were drunk.”

Today, English soccer stadiums are chock-a-block with plush seating and luxury suites. But in 1989, many pitches were derelict and undersized. Because there weren’t enough seats for fans, teams typically opened up standing-room-only sections, with steel fences separating the spectators from the field.

At 2:52 p.m. on the day of the Hillsborough game, police opened the gates a few minutes after kickoff and thousands of fans rushed in. As more and more spectators pushed forward for a view of the field, some became trapped against the metal fences.

“Fans screamed at passing police to open the perimeter gates but they walked on by,” wrote Brian Reade, a reporter for England’s Mirror newspaper, who attended the match. “Some who tried to climb over the fence were battered back down. Others crawled on all fours above heads towards the back of the terrace and were hoisted to safety by fans in the stand above.”

Even though police were monitoring events on closed-circuit cameras, the gates remained locked. Instead, police moved in with dogs.

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“They believed what they were seeing behind the cages was not innocents trapped in a killing field, but hooligans orchestrating a pitch invasion,” Reade wrote.

Some victims died standing up, of asphyxia. Others were crushed or trampled when a crash barrier collapsed.

Finally, at 3:06 p.m., the referee led both teams off the field.