West Midlands Police cited fictitious match in report ahead of Maccabi game

“West Ham had never played Maccabi Tel Aviv. On that day, West Ham played Olympiacos of Greece and beat them one-nil.”

Mann said that what he expected from “a proper police intelligence report is, someone would talk to Metropolitan Police about what happened two years ago when these Maccabi ‘hooligans’, as they're called, came to London. Because, obviously, there'll have been problems. They couldn't do that because the fixture didn’t take place.”

Mann also questioned some of the other figures provided by West Midlands Police ahead of the fixture.

Asked by Liberal Democrat MP Paul Kohler what he made of the intelligence assessment, Mann responded: “It’s inaccurate. It conflates different things.”

The report claimed that a number of Palestinian flags were pulled down from facades of buildings by Israeli supporters. Mann pointed out that there was only a single reported incident in which this happened.

He added, however, that pulling down the flag was “highly inflammatory” and would likely “get a bad reaction”

“I'm not minimising the impact of pulling the flag down, but there was one flag pulled down…there weren't flags, and it didn't happen on the Thursday – the match day – it happened on the Wednesday. But this said on match day, that is inaccurate. There is no evidential base of that whatsoever.”

He went on to say that while the report claimed there were “running street battles between the two groups throughout the day”, Mann said that Dutch police had successfully kept groups separate on match day until the evening, when the Israeli fans were hunted down.

When confronted about the West Ham fixture that did not take place, Craig Guildford admitted the error.

“The one assertion in relation to West Ham is completely wrong,” but he said it was “one element in the document which was 8-9 pages long”.

Questioned as to why no-one in West Midlands Police spoke to their London counterparts in the Metropolitan Police, he responded: “I believe that that particular piece of information, which was wrong, which we placed on that document, was irrelevant.”

He also denied taking a “cavalier approach” to policing.

Kohler then pressed West Midlands Police about the fictitious West Ham fixture. He noted that Maccabi Tel Aviv had previously played fixtures in the UK against Chelsea (in 2015) and against Stoke City in 2011.

He asked: “You were even able to cite fictitious matches off the internet. You didn't actually go to look for actual information from those who had Maccabi fans previously. Is that right?”

Guildford responded: “I think when you say fictitious match off the internet, I've been really straightforward in saying that as part of my preparation, that was wrong.”

Additionally, West Midlands Police their decision-making and said that their assessments were based on conversations of officers within the force with their Dutch counterparts.

Guildford also told the committee: “I suspect there was lots of pressure locally on the Dutch police as a result of this match. My very careful conclusion … is that I think initially the Dutch probably underestimated the level of threat and risk. The day before the match they were extremely stretched. The day of the match they deployed an abundance of riot trained police and I think the whole incident left them in a position whereby they hadn’t anticipated the level of disorder.”