Health officials today apologised to former Beatle George Harrison and the schizophrenic man who stabbed him.
A new report found major lapses in attacker Michael Abram's treatment before he broke into Harrison's home.
"We wish to make a full and formal apology to George Harrison and his family and to Michael Abram and his family for the failures in Mr Abram's care and treatment prior to the appalling events of December 1999," said the St Helens and Knowsley Health Authority and the St Helens and Knowsley Hospitals National Health Service Trust in a statement.
"We wish to reassure the Harrison and Abram families that lessons have been learned," it said. The sharply critical report released today said workers at the hospitals and clinics who saw Abram as a patient failed to properly assess and treat him.
It criticised doctors who released him from a hospital a month before the attack and said he should have been put in a treatment programme 18 months earlier.
"There is no doubt, with hindsight, that there were shortcomings in the mental health services we provided," said Ken Sanderson of the St Helens and Knowsley Hospitals NHS Trust.
"Michael Abram had complex mental health problems which we failed to comprehensively assess and manage."
Abram, 35, was accused by prosecutors of breaking into Harrison's home at Henley-on-Thames, west of London and stabbing him repeatedly, puncturing a lung.
He also was charged with attacking Harrison's wife, Olivia, when she came to his defence.
A judge last year ordered jurors to find Abram innocent by reason of insanity after three psychiatrics testified he had been a paranoid schizophrenic since 1990.
He told psychiatrists he was on a "mission from God" and believed he was possessed by the former Beatle when he rampaged through the Harrisons' 120 room mansion.
Abram had sought help in the weeks before the 30 December, 1999 attack.