Two video tapes containing CCTV footage of events at Hillsborough football ground, which left 96 people dead in 1989, were stolen from Sheffield Wednesday’s control room soon after the disaster, the new inquest into the tragedy has been told.
Roger Houldsworth, an electronics engineer responsible for the Hillsborough CCTV system at the time, has told a court he believes the thief must have thought the tapes showed the large exit gate being opened on police orders at 2:52pm that day. The jury has heard that this allowed large numbers of Liverpool supporters into the ground for the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest. They went into overcrowded central pens of the Leppings Lane terrace, where the lethal crush happened. In fact, the tapes did not contain footage of the gate being opened; they were fed from two other cameras at the ground.
Questioned by Jason Beer QC, representing Sheffield Wednesday, Houldsworth said he ejected the tapes from their recorders at between 4.15pm and 4.30pm, after the disaster had happened. He locked the control room and set the alarm around two hours later. Houldsworth said he did leave the room during those two hours to deliver documentation to the club’s secretary, Graham Mackrell, and that may have been the time the theft was committed. However, he rejected Beer’s suggestion that “hundreds of people were milling around” that part of the football ground at that time.
“There may have been a few bobbies,” Houldsworth said.
Houldsworth also said that South Yorkshire police officers have since falsely claimed that their camera, which was trained on the terrace’s overcrowded central pens, or the monitor showing its view, were not working. He also rejected a police claim that the force had no surviving video footage of the central pens at the time of the crush because an officer may have accidentally turned off the recorder with his knee.
“All I can say is that they must have had very pointy knees,” Houldsworth told the jury. He told the coroner, Lord Justice Goldring, that he believed it was “nigh on impossible” to turn the video recorder off accidentally, because the buttons to record and stop were small and very tactile. The police could decide not to record footage from that camera, Houldsworth said, but the camera was operational, and all the monitors worked.
Houldsworth said he was watching the scenes the police cameras were filming on the monitors in the club’s control room. When the police ordered the large exit gate to be opened to relieve congestion outside the Leppings Lane turnstiles, Houldsworth said he could see on his own monitors that the police camera showed the central pens already overcrowded. He said he expected to hear an order over the police radio to close the tunnel leading to those central pens, so that supporters would not go down it, but none was given. Houldsworth had seen the tunnel closed off with temporary metal barriers the previous year, he said, when the pens were full at the 1988 FA Cup semi-final between the same two clubs.
When the exit gate was opened at the 1989 match, he said, he became concerned about the overcrowding in the central pens. Beer asked him: “You looked at the monitor that displayed the police cameras to see what it was showing, and it was showing a view of the Leppings Lane terrace?”
“Correct,” Houldsworth replied.
Beer said there has been police evidence that the camera was not working, that it was “flaring”, that its monitor was not working and that video footage has not survived because the recorder was accidentally turned off by somebody’s knee. Houldsworth rejected all those claims; he said he had fixed a problem with camera 5 in the morning of the match, and made sure the camera and all monitors were working.
The inquest continues.
