UKIP leader admits website claim he lost close friends at Hillsborough disaster was false

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FILE - In this April 15, 1989 file photo, showing police, stewards and supporters as they tend to wounded soccer supporters on the field at Hillsborough Stadium, in Sheffield, England. 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in the incident at the FA Cup semi-final match Liverpool against Nottingham Forest. After a long campaign by relatives of the 96 soccer fans who were crushed to death in Britain’s worst sporting disaster, some 400,000 pages of previously undisclosed papers will be released Wednesday Sept. 12, 2012, and the previously secret documents may clarify what caused the disaster and how mistakes by British authorities may have contributed to the 1989 tragedy. (AP Photo, File)

Published: 2:07pm, 15 Feb 2017Updated: 9:31pm, 15 Feb 2017

The leader of Britain’s right-wing UK Independence Party, Paul Nuttall, has been forced to admit that claims on his website about losing close friends in the 1989 Hillborough stadium disaster were false.

In an interview with Liverpool’s Radio City News on Tuesday, it was put to him that in 2012 he said on his website that he had “lost close personal friends”. Nuttall denied making the claim.

When the presenter, Dave Easson, who was at Hillsborough in Sheffield on the day of the disaster, showed him the evidence that the claim had been made on his website, Nuttall replied: “I haven’t lost a close, personal friend. I’ve lost someone who I know.”

Nuttall then suggested that he was not responsible for the statement, saying: “I’m sorry about that, but that is something … I haven’t put that out. That is wrong.”

In this April 15, 1989, file photo, police, stewards and supporters tend to victims of the spectator crush at Hillsborough Stadium, in Sheffield, in which 96 Liverpool fans were killed. Photo: AP

Ukip subsequently announced that a party press officer, Linda Roughley, had offered her resignation, and issued a statement in which she was quoted as saying: “I am entirely responsible for the website post regarding Paul’s comments about having ‘close friends’ who died at Hillsborough. Paul is a man of great integrity and would not say something he knew to be untrue. It’s me who has made this mistake, and one I feel absolutely terrible about.

“I am frankly mortified at the distress this issue has caused Paul and may have caused to anyone involved with the Hillsborough tragedy. I have today offered my resignation, I could not be more sorry.”

Nuttall’s admission came four days after Nuttall had denied lying about being at Hillsborough on the day of the 1989 disaster, in which 96 people died as a result of a crowd crush during a FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.