West Midlands police officers investigating how 96 Liverpool football supporters died at Hillsborough became aggressive when questioning a survivor and repeatedly tried to “drag” his interview back to alleged drinking and misbehaviour by fans, the new inquests into the deaths have heard.

Ian Lee, who was 28 and a research scientist for ICI when he attended the 1989 FA Cup semi-final to watch Liverpool play Nottingham Forest, said the officers wrote out a statement from his interview that was misleading and inaccurate.

Having survived the lethal crush in “pen” four of Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace, where he saw two people turn blue and die, and having carried out a young boy he thought had died in his arms, Lee said he did not give the statement “the due diligence I should have done” before he signed it.

He told the court in Warrington that he was not given a copy of that May 1989 statement and never saw it again until last September, more than 25 years later, when he was interviewed by officers from Operation Resolve, the new police investigation into the disaster. The statement included an observation that supporters without tickets were allowed to get close to the ground, which Lee said he would never have made, as he could not possibly have known if this was true.

“I said at the time and maintained, and have maintained through all the time that the primary reason for the tragedy was lack of policing and stewarding,” Lee said. Outside the Leppings Lane turnstiles before the match, he said, it was “chaotic”, with no control by the South Yorkshire police of the crowd trying to get into the ground, and mounted officers “engaged too late” to have any effect. He was also very critical of the response to the unfolding disaster, supporters’ screams for help and ultimately their deaths, by South Yorkshire police and South Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service. It was “a statement of fact”, he said, that there was no coordinated response.

However, when he was visited at his home by two officers from West Midlands police, the force appointed to independently investigate the disaster for Lord Justice Taylor’s 1989 official inquiry, Lee said their mood changed when he talked about police deficiencies.

“They became more intimidating, more aggressive in their questioning. Every time I tried to put my story forward, what I thought the primary reasons were, they tried to drag it back to fans, fans drinking, fans’ behaviour.”

In the statement, which one of the West Midlands officers hand-wrote, Lee said his criticisms of the South Yorkshire police were diminished, and the emphasis, and deficiencies highlighted, were very different.

Both Lee and another survivor, Deborah Routledge, who was crushed against the metal mesh fence at the front of pen three for 25 minutes, recalled South Yorkshire police officers ignoring people screaming for help as the crush tightened. Routledge, 18 at the time, now a claims handler for the insurance company esure, suffered head, arm and side injuries. She said people were screaming to police officers, asking for them to open the gate in the fence, and eventually it was forced open.

“Then I saw the officers who had their backs to us, turn round and push people back in [to the pen] and shut the gate,” she said.

Lee told the inquests that as conditions on the terrace became more chaotic and it was more evident there was “serious casualty potential,” people were screaming at police officers to open the gate, and “to do something”.

Questioned by Matthew Hill, counsel to the coroner, Lord Justice Goldring, about how the police officers responded, Lee replied: “It was ignored completely.”

He said that in the crush, he saw two people he believed were dead, including one bent over a metal crush barrier whom he thought had broken his back. Eventually the police did open the gate, and people began to get out. Lee saw a young boy, aged 12 or 13, trapped beneath an older man, and he managed to pick the boy up and carry him out. He said as he carried him alongside the pitch, towards a man he thought had medical training, Lee felt the boy stop breathing in his arms. The inquests were told later that in fact the boy survived.

Routledge said her friend, Lisa Riding, was carried out of pen three 10 minutes after her, and laid on an advertising hoarding brought by some Liverpool supporters. Asked about the response by South Yorkshire police to the disaster as the crush developed and casualties emerged, Routledge said: “It was slow, it was confused, and it was chaos.”

The inquests continue.