Victims of Hillsborough stadium disaster were unlawfully killed: Jury

The 96 soccer fans who died in Britain's worst-ever sporting disaster, the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium crush, were unlawfully killed, with police failures to blame, a jury hearing inquests into the death concluded on Tuesday.

The victims, many young, died in an overcrowded, fenced-in enclosure at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, northern England, at an FA Cup semi-final against NottinghamForest on a warm, sunny afternoon on April 15, 1989.

New inquests were ordered in December 2012 when London's High Court quashed accidental death verdicts from 21 years earlier after an independent inquiry found new evidence and absolved the fans of any responsibility.

Members the jury heard evidence from around 1,000 witnesses during the more than two years the hearings have been ongoing for.

The fresh inquests began on March 31 2014, in a specially built courtroom in Warrington.

The jury overseeing the new inquests ruled that the fans had been unlawfully killed and that police commanders had made mistakes in the build-up to the match and on the day itself, the BBC reported.