Hillsborough: Norman Bettison stands down from West Yorkshire police Norman Bettison resigns from West Yorkshire police Link to this video The chief constable of West Yorkshire police, Sir Norman Bettison, has resigned, two days after he was accused in parliament of boasting about making up false stories to blame Liverpool supporters for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster while he was serving with South Yorkshire police. The accusation was made by Maria Eagle, Labour MP for Liverpool Garston, based on an account of a conversation with Bettison given by John Barry, who studied with him on a part-time MBA at Sheffield Business School at the time of the Sheffield football stadium disaster. Bettison denied the allegation, as he denied his involvement in what Eagle called in parliament in 1998 a "black propaganda unit" set up by South Yorkshire police deflect blame for the disaster, in which 96 Liverpool supporters died. He said he was resigning because the continued attention on Hillsborough had "become a distraction to policing in West Yorkshire." The Independent Police Complaints Commission has mounted an investigation into possible criminal misconduct by Bettison and other officers, including perverting the course of justice, The IPCC said: "We can, and in this case will, investigate criminal offences and misconduct matters after an officer has retired or resigned." The investigation into Bettison's role while he was a chief inspector, then superintendent in South Yorkshire police in 1989, follows last month's report by the Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP), which included evidence of Bettison's role. It said he had been a member of the "Wain Group," senior South Yorkshire police officers who planned to present "a suitable case" to the official inquiry into the disaster by Lord Justice Taylor. The Wain group's report placed "significant emphasis" on stories of Liverpool supporters having been drunk, without tickets and misbehaving, but Taylor, and the panel, found the stories to be false. Taylor principally blamed the disaster on mismanagement of the crowd by South Yorkshire police. The commanding officer, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, had ordered an exit gate at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough football ground to be opened, to relieve a crush outside the ground and let a large number of Liverpool supporters onto the Leppings Lane terrace. Taylor found it was a "blunder of the first magnitude" not to close off a tunnel inside, which led many more supporters to the terrace's already overcrowded central "pens." However, South Yorkshire police did not accept that judgement, and re-emphasised the stories of supporters' misbehaviour, including in its evidence to the subsequent inquest. The panel found, based on South Yorkshire police's own internal documents, that Bettison had presented an edited video of the disaster, apparently sympathetic to South Yorkshire police's version of events, to the Conservative MP Michael Shersby, who represented the Police Federation's interests in parliament, then to a group of MPs in parliament. On October 12, the IPCC announced an investigation for possible misconduct, following the West Yorkshire Police Authority (WYPA) referral of complaints relating to "Mr Bettison's involvement in disseminating misleading information" about Hillsborough. The IPCC is also investigating another WYPA-referred complaint, that Bettison "attempted to influence" the first referral about his Hillsborough conduct. Bettison announced on 5 October he would be retiring from the West Yorkshire force in March. But on Monday, during a House of Commons debate on the panel's report, Eagle read from Barry's letter, written in 1998 to Ann Adlington, the then solicitor for the Hillsborough Family Support Group (HFSG). "Weeks after the game," Barry wrote, "we were in a pub after our weekly evening class. [Bettison] told me that he had been asked by his senior officers to put together the South Yorkshire police evidence for the forthcoming [Taylor] inquiry. [Bettison] said that: 'We are trying to concoct a story that all the Liverpool fans were drunk and we were afraid that they were going to break down the gates, so we decided to open them'. Eagle said: "Here we have an account of a contemporaneous conversation in which Norman Bettison boasts that he is engaged in a South Yorkshire police plot to fit up the Liverpool fans and deflect blame from the force... so what Sir Norman denies in public he boasts about in private conversations." Bettison denied Barry's allegation , in his resignation statement and said he was not resigning specifically because of Hillsborough, but because the WYPA and some candidates in the forthcoming police and crime commissioner elections, had urged him to. "I do so not because of any allegations about the past, but because I share the view that this has become a distraction to policing in West Yorkshire," he wrote. He said of Barry's letter: "The suggestion that I would say to a passing acquaintance that I was deployed as part of a team tasked to 'concoct a false story of what happened' is both incredible and wrong." The bereaved Hillsborough families have singled Bettison out of the six officers named by Eagle in 1998 because he was appointed chief constable of Merseyside police just six months later.