Hillsborough inquests - December 15

The Hillsborough inquests commenced on March 31, 2014 and are the subject of reporting restrictions that have been imposed by the Attorney General's office. Liverpool Football Club is respectful of these restrictions and will therefore only be making available updates from other media channels for the duration of the inquest.

The report below - and the witness testimony contained within it - does not necessarily reflect the views of Liverpool FC. Please be aware that the reports on these pages will contain evidence about the day of the disaster which may be distressing.

To view archive reports from each day of the inquest hearings, click here.

Courtesy of the Liverpool Echo - December 15

An ambulance officer described pulling a teenage boy from a pile of dead bodies laid out after the Hillsborough disaster.

Peter Litster, who was a leading ambulanceman in 1989, said he had noticed the boy move in the pile of people presumed dead when he arrived back at the Leppings Lane end of the ground at about 4pm, after taking two casualties to hospital.

He said: "It was a young person of about 13 years of age. He was in the second row of bodies and he was moving, so I got hold of him and pulled him out, realising he wasn't actually a person who was deceased.

"He was actually laying on top of his father. He was calling out 'dad'."

He confirmed to the court that he saw the boy, whose face looked white, move after another body was placed on top of him.

He said it seemed as though the boy had been placed there by someone who believed he was dead.

He said: "I spoke to the doctor in attendance and asked him to ensure that whomever was on this pile, that they were in fact deceased."

The inquests into the 96 deaths heard Mr Litster, who had worked for the ambulance service since 1973, had been called to the ground at 3.18pm on April 15, 1989.

After taking two casualties to hospital he returned to the ground and was contacted over radio by ambulance control who asked him to contact the duty officer at the ground and to assume the role of duty officer until that person could be found - but the second part of the message did not transmit.

The court heard Mr Litster's statement had been changed to include a line which said: "I also received a further instruction from control during this call which stated 'a further message, please establish yourself as my contact duty officer'."

But Mr Litster said he had not received that message.

Asked about his statement, he said: "All the amendments there that I haven't signed, which that is part of, were not done by myself."

When asked previously why he thought his statement had been changed he said: "What we have got here is someone who is trying to manipulate and do things according to the way they wanted it to be rather than the way it actually was."

Mr Litster said when he returned to the ground at 4pm there was no senior ambulance officer at the Leppings Lane end so he took responsibility for moving an ambulance which was blocking other emergency vehicles and directing ambulances to hospitals.

He described the organisation at the scene as "terrible".

He said he later encountered Assistant Chief Ambulance Officer David Jones.

He said: "He was leaning against the wall outside gate C, banging his personal radio against the wall."

He asked Mr Jones to take over the scene but Mr Jones told him to carry on and went to the gymnasium.

Mr Litster said: "He looked more shocked than anything about the whole scenario and walked away."

In an interview with the Sunday Express newspaper in 2012 Mr Litster said: "I had to take control because my senior officer was in a panic and unable to function. He couldn't cope.

He added: "The Liverpool fans were magnificent."

Mr Litster said on the Monday after the disaster he prepared a handwritten statement but that was taken from him and another statement was written after he had a meeting with station officer Patrick Higgins and two other men.

He said: "He tried to get me to give a statement in respect of what had happened throughout, but I had to be careful of what was actually being stated."

He said he was told not to include certain details, particularly those which criticised senior officer Mr Jones.

Officers in the major incident room at South Yorkshire Police headquarters initially thought there were public disorder problems at Hillsborough, the inquests also heard.

Malcolm Edmundson, the chief inspector in charge of the operations room at force HQ, told the court in Birchwood Park, Warrington, he was based in the major incident room on April 15, 1989, where he monitored radio traffic about the match.

The jury heard that at 3.07pm PC Trevor Bichard, based in the control box at Hillsborough, sent a message to HQ to call for operation support.

Mr Edmundson said: "If Operation Support was called, it was an absolute priority message that was sent out to all parts of the force and anybody that was trained in public order would be required to attend wherever we asked them to go, in this case Hillsborough."

He added: "We in the operations room at that time thought it was a public order incident, a fight of some description, or something like that, where people had gone into the wrong end of the ground, which was a regular occurrence at times at matches, and that's what we actually thought, especially when Operation Support was called."

The court heard that in a call to the ambulance service, an officer from the police operations room said fans had collapsed a gate at the ground.

And radio transcripts showed Mr Edmundson saying to the fire service: "The crowds have forced their way in. They've broken the gates and fences down. I don't know exactly what it is but there are people trapped."

The transcripts also showed a sergeant was told by HQ over the radio there had been "mass fighting in lumps".

But Mr Edmundson accepted he should have known earlier that they were dealing with a major incident.

He said he was "blind" to what was happening and relied on officers at the ground to inform him.

The inquests continue.