Twenty years on from Istanbul: the night when football became murder for Leeds — The Athletic 3/4/20
By Phil Hay
The plaque on the wall by Elland Road’s East Stand says
“Never Forgotten” and Leeds United swore themselves to those words. The stadium
is stuck in a state of eerie silence but this Sunday it will do what it always
does on April 5 by standing in salute to the two who were lost.
Every year, the families of Kevin Speight and Chris Loftus
place wreathes at the plaque and go together for a drink, to catch up and
reflect. This year is the 20th anniversary of the men’s deaths in Istanbul and
many of their relatives carry those events as if they happened yesterday. It is
part of Leeds United’s fabric and it will never disappear: the night when
football became murder and so many lives were changed.
The passing of time is there in all of them. Speight’s son,
George, is no longer the cheeky kid with floppy hair smiling brightly in the
photograph of his father he digs out. Loftus’s brother Andy jokes that he had
thicker hair back in the day. The security guard who was in Turkey with the
club’s players and directors is into his 50s and taking it easy after neck
surgery. Peter Ridsdale, the chairman who guided Leeds through the tragedy, is
approaching 70. And others, like Eddie Gray and Ian Harte, have moved on with
their lives. You ask them one by one if 20 years have helped them process what
happened. They all say no.
The setting was Turkey’s biggest city, on the banks of the
Bosphorus, and the game was the first leg of a UEFA Cup semi-final. Galatasaray
away on April 6, 2000; “a huge occasion for the club in a football sense,”
Ridsdale says. By the time the match kicked off, the ramifications of two fatal
stabbings the previous evening were rapidly sinking in and for those who were
closest to it, the images won’t fade.
This is Istanbul, through their eyes.
The son — George Speight
The Speights were a close family who lived in the Yorkshire
village of Farsley, where Kevin Speight was landlord of the Bay Horse pub. He
had a passion for Lambretta scooters and spent his spare time fixing old models
in his mother’s garden. The story goes that he and his wife Susan got together
after he offered her a lift on the back of one. They had been a couple since
their teens.
For George, the clearest memories of his dad are few and
slightly random. He was seven when Speight died, his sister Holly two. There
was the time when he was caught stealing two pounds from the pub till and sent
by Speight to sit in the office until Susan came home to read the riot act.
There was the time when the pub opened its doors early to allow the locals to
catch an early kick-off between Leeds and Manchester United. And there was the
time when Speight took him to Elland Road and George, in his infancy,
mistakenly cheered when the opposition scored. “It’s funny what sticks in your
head,” he says.
George has no recollection of his dad leaving for Istanbul
or of him saying goodbye. All he recalls about the incident was being woken up
by Susan the following morning and told, as softly as it could be broken, that
Speight had died. “We switched on the telly and it was all over the news,”
George says. “My mum flicked it straight off again. For me, it didn’t feel
real. When you’re seven you can’t process something like that, can you? I’m not
sure I’ve even processed it now. Because I was so young and the memories aren’t
clear, I get times when I ask myself if it really happened.” Holly, as a
two-year-old, was left with no memories at all. “I feel sorry for her,” George
says. “She’s struggled with it more than I have because she’s got nothing
there. She knows who he was but it’s not the same.”
Speight was with a group of Leeds fans attacked by Turkish
locals outside a bar by Istanbul’s Taksim Square, sustaining a slash wound to
his stomach. He died in an operating theatre in the early hours of the morning,
despite Leeds United paying for blood supplies to be rushed to him. George is
aware of some of the details but has tried not to dig too deeply. “I know bits
and bats but it doesn’t help me to go over it,” he says. “A lot of what went on
I don’t want to know.
“I heard the rumours — that some Leeds fan wiped his arse
with a Turkey flag and things like that — but people tell me none of it’s true.
I can only go on what my mum said, but my dad was nothing like that. He wasn’t
one of them who tried to cause trouble. My mum always says the same: He’d gone
out there for the football, nothing else. He just happened to run into some
tossers with knives.”
George was so young that the aftermath almost strayed into
boyhood adventure. He was showered with stickers and sweets — gifts from
friends who lived locally — and Ridsdale, who supported both families
throughout, delivered Easter eggs to the house for him and Holly. “The eggs
were massive and I was chuffed to bits with mine,” he says. “It sounds daft but
I don’t think I knew how to react. When the press came round, me and my cousin
would bounce on my bed to try and get in the photos and in the papers. You’re a
kid. You don’t get it.”
Susan chose not to take the children to Speight’s funeral.
George understands why but wishes with hindsight that he had been there. He
visited his father’s body in the chapel of rest across the road, bringing
pictures he had drawn for him with felt tips. It is 10 years since he last went
to the grave. “I prefer to go to the plaque at Elland Road,” he says. “I prefer
to remember that way.” George is a regular at Leeds games but until his teens
he would wait outside the stadium at the home fixture closest to the April 5
anniversary while a minute’s applause played out. The first time he went inside
to be present, he sat with friends and cried.
Association with the tragedy can be difficult. In the case of Loftus’ brother Andy, he prefers not to make a big deal of his surname for fear of the questions that might follow; the feeling of being “always on show”. George is different. “People know me because of my dad,” he says. “I’ll hear them saying, ‘That’s Kevin Speight’s lad’ and I like that. I like that they remember him. It’s a strange thing but it’s important to me. People speak well of him. It makes me proud.” Like his father, George has the nickname Spag.
Ridsdale is someone the Speights hold in high regard. In the
weeks after the deaths, he offered them emotional and financial assistance (the
family declined to take any money) and would phone Susan regularly to keep in
touch. Football and Leeds’s financial collapse made Ridsdale persona non grata
at Elland Road but George says his mum’s face lit up when she heard that he was
being interviewed for this article. “Without his help, my mum would have been a
bit lost,” George says. “You mention him over Farsley way and people respect
him. They know what he did for us.”
The chairman — Peter Ridsdale
The images are so vivid in Peter Ridsdale’s mind that he can
describe every aspect of the hospital where Speight and Loftus were taken after
they were attacked. He can picture the facade as he entered and the floorplan
of the area where other injured Leeds fans had congregated; where Speight lay
on an operating table, desperate for surgery.
Ridsdale and Leeds’s operations director, David Spencer,
were at a floating restaurant on the Bosphorus when they were phoned to tell
them trouble in the centre of Istanbul had resulted in at least two fans being
hospitalised. Convention required the directors of the clubs involved in a
European tie to share a meal with UEFA delegates the night before the game and
Galatasaray arranged the gathering, not far from the Kempinski Hotel where
Leeds’s players and directors were staying.
Spencer interrupted dinner to advise Ridsdale that they
should return to the hotel immediately. Ridsdale agreed to send his wife and
other officials back but instructed a car to take him and Spencer to Taksim
Hospital. “My instinct was that we had to know what was happening,” Ridsdale
says. “We had hundreds of fans in Turkey, some in the air and another plane due
to fly the following morning (the morning flight out from Leeds-Bradford
Airport was rapidly cancelled). More importantly, we needed to find out what
state the two lads were in and whether we could help them.”
At the hospital, Ridsdale encountered “absolute chaos”.
Friends and family of Speight and Loftus had congregated there and other Leeds
fans were waiting with more minor injuries, some of them slash wounds.
Confusion reigned. Loftus had already been pronounced dead and in the melee,
hospital staff mistakenly assumed Ridsdale was a relative and took him
downstairs to the mortuary.
“I had no idea where we were going or why we were going
there,” he says. “When we got to the bottom of the stairs they pulled out a
drawer, a bit like a filing cabinet, and Christopher’s body was there. His
brother was following behind us and, quite understandably, he lost it. He
started shouting for Christopher to wake up. It was a haunting moment then and
it haunts me now. There was nothing you could say to him. We were just trying
to control the worst situation imaginable.”
Ridsdale was told by staff at the hospital that Speight was
in a critical condition and needed an urgent transfusion but that the blood had
to be paid for. Several fans offered to foot the bill. Spencer stepped in and
paid with his personal credit card. “I don’t want to imply criticism of the
hospital for that,” Ridsdale says. “The blood had to be sourced externally and
to do that, someone had to pay. That’s just how the system worked. It wasn’t a
proper A&E unit. We weren’t talking about Leeds General Infirmary.”
Speight’s treatment failed to save him.
At no stage between arriving at the hospital and Leeds
playing the first leg against Galatasaray the following night did Ridsdale
sleep. Leeds had worries on several fronts: maintaining the safety of other
fans in the city, helping the relatives of Speight and Loftus in Turkey and at
home, and deciding whether the game at the Ali Sami Yen stadium should even go
ahead. At a local police station, at around 4am on April 6, Ridsdale was given
a stark message by the UEFA representative who turned up there: play the game,
or forfeit it and incur an automatic 3-0 defeat. The police warned a
postponement could cause more trouble. The Football Association’s David Davies
said playing the game was “the least worst option”. So Leeds did.
“If you ask me now if I made the right or wrong decision by
playing it, I still don’t know,” Ridsdale says. “We could only do what we
thought was best at that moment.” The journey to the stadium prior to kick-off
made him wish he had forfeited it and taken the consequences. “We had a coach
for the players and a coach for the directors,” he says. “Galatasaray
supporters, despite everything that had gone on, were pelting the buses and
trying to smash the windows. The police were doing nothing to stop them. I genuinely
feared for our lives. If someone could have shown me those levels of
intimidation, I’d have refused to play the game unhesitatingly. No question.”
Ridsdale still struggles to accept Galatasaray’s indifferent
reaction to the stabbings. When the Turkish club flew over for the return leg
two weeks later, an occasion as venomous and bitter as any Elland Road has
hosted, they railed against Ridsdale’s request that their fans be banned from
travelling. UEFA, after a week of consideration, agreed with Leeds. Away
tickets were limited to 80, which effectively covered only senior Galatasaray
officials.
“I don’t think, even to this day, that Galatasaray would see the amount of press coverage or criticism as being fairly labelled against them,” Risdale says. “They felt we were overreacting and on the day of the game in Istanbul there was no attempt to make sure the match passed off safely or securely, not that I could see.
“When they came back to Elland Road they thought our request
for no away fans was inappropriate. They thought we were looking for a sporting
advantage, which is just incredible. From my point of view I was only
interested in getting that game over and done with as safely as possible. The
potential for trouble was as high as anything I’d been involved in. It was
horrible.
“I’ll be careful here but I have to say that I felt
uncomfortable welcoming Galatasaray’s delegates to Elland Road. I didn’t feel
that their response was what our response would have been. I make no secret of
that.”
Leeds were beaten 2-0 in Istanbul and lost over two legs
after a 2-2 draw at home. There is very little about the football which
Ridsdale cares to remember and at the Ali Sami Yen, the stadium was so
overcrowded that he had Galatasaray fans in front of him “literally sat on my
feet.” The next day, he and Leeds’ players and coaching staff reached the
airport, climbed on a plane and flew home. “There was a sense of relief to be
leaving,” he says, “but I knew that flying out of Istanbul wasn’t the end of it.
I knew the ramifications would be life-long.”
The brother — Andy Loftus
Over a coffee in Starbucks, George Speight finds a way to be
philosophical about his father’s death. He has a busy job as an electrician and
a twinkle in his eye. Life is good.
The shadow of Istanbul is longer for Andy Loftus. We catch
up at the cafe in an Asda store near his home in Killingbeck and he speaks
bravely but reluctantly; not because he wants to but because he thinks he
should, for the sake of his brother Chris’s memory.
Andy is one of six siblings, two sisters and four brothers,
and all of the boys — Phil, Chris, Darren and Andy — made the trip to Turkey.
In the context of football, that era was phenomenally good: Leeds in Europe and
another trip to the continent always waiting around the corner. “You got paid
each month and you did this,” Andy says, gesturing as if to push a wad of
banknotes into a drawer. Loftus, 35, was a telephone engineer and an easy-going
lad. “He liked a drink and a laugh, simple as that,” Andy says. “Obviously he
liked his football too. He’d just met a girl. They’d been seeing each other for
about six months.”
The cause of the fighting which broke out after dark in Istanbul was a subject of fierce contention in the weeks after the stabbings. Turkish eye-witnesses accused Leeds fans of insulting women, defacing the Turkish flag, urinating in the street and tipping over a car. Leeds supporters who were present denied causing trouble and the UK coroner who presided over the inquest, David Hinchliff, stated in unequivocal terms that Speight and Loftus were the innocent victims of a deliberate ambush. He described the Turkish policing as “diabolical” and “out of control”.
Speight and Loftus were not close friends but knew each
other in passing, as travelling football fans do. The Loftuses had travelled to
Turkey on the same flight as David O’Leary’s players. Speight arrived soon
after and was seen chatting to midfielder Alan Smith as they walked through the
breezy foyer at Ataturk Airport. The routine for Andy and others who went
abroad with Leeds was always the same: straight to the hotel, straight into
town, straight on the beer. It was how away days in Europe played out.
“We’d heard that Istanbul could be a bit dangerous but we
never thought anything of it,” Andy says. “You don’t take much notice of what’s
said because you’re out there for a beer and a laugh. There were a few Turkish
fans outside the bars we started drinking in but we didn’t think much of it.
Right up to the attack, I didn’t see any trouble.” Other fans in Istanbul spoke
of isolated incidents here and there but nothing serious.
“Even now I get the feeling that people think we started
it,” Andy says. “It’s that attitude of, ‘They must have gone looking for it.’
All the stuff about cars being tipped over, us disrespecting their women — if
you’d been there, you’d know. It was a load of shit. The police told us
themselves that the shoe-shine boys had been trailing us for a while, waiting
to see when some of us had split away from the main group.”
Later in the evening, a group of around 20 Leeds supporters
broke off and found their way to the Riddim bar near Taksim Square, the huge
expanse in the centre of Istanbul which was filled with places to eat and
drink. After a while, Andy’s eldest brother Phil complained of feeling ill and
the two of them decided to go back to their hotel. Andy’s last memory of Chris
is of him rolling his eyes sarcastically and ribbing him for leaving early, in
brotherly style. At the hotel, Phil went up to his room. Andy got a pint at the
bar.
“I can’t explain it but I got this weird feeling,” he says.
“A couple of lads came back to the hotel on their own and when I asked where
the rest of them were, they didn’t know. Then a good mate of mine appeared and
said there’d been a bit of trouble. But he didn’t make much of it, like it was
something of nothing. It didn’t sit right with me. I jumped in a taxi and went
back to Taksim Square.”
He has no recollection of how he came to be at Taksim
Hospital, only that he found himself there after being told that the fighting
had been serious. When he arrived at the hospital, Darren was in a bed with
head injuries. Witnesses said he had been bludgeoned by police as he cradled a
dying Chris in the street. Another supporter who tried to resuscitate Chris was
hit with batons. “The police were knocking everyone about,” says Paul Holmes, a
friend of the Loftuses who was in Taksim Square when the violence broke out.
“It was completely against your idea of law and order. Everything happened in a
flash. One minute you’re coming out of a bar, the next you’ve got people
running to attack you. Then you turn around and Kevin and Chris are lying
there.”
In the hospital’s waiting area, Andy overheard a voice
saying that one of the fatalities was “one of the four brothers”. “It was a lad
from Shipley who I knew,” Andy says. “I didn’t catch everything but I heard
enough. It triggered something and I ran into the ward. Our Daz was there and
he told me the full story. I was totally speechless, totally shocked.
Devastated.”
The next 24 hours were a blur. The brothers went to the
British Embassy but, in Andy’s words, found them to be “worse than useless”.
The friend who arranged their trips abroad organised for them to fly home via
Brussels. They phoned their parents back home but the media had already
informed them of Chris’s death. When they landed at Leeds-Bradford airport, a
Leeds United club car was waiting to pick them up from the runaway, avoiding
the cameras waiting inside. “It was weird because when we got in the car, the
game (Galatasaray versus Leeds) had just started and was on the radio,” Andy
says. “The driver said he’d turn it off but I wanted to listen to it. I don’t
know why.”
The bodies were repatriated a few days later, beginning the
process of mourning and funerals. Tributes began to cover the gates and the
Billy Bremner Statue at Elland Road.
Holmes says Andy was “the life and soul of the party” before
Istanbul but the impact of Chris’s death was severe. Andy was jailed in 2013
for his part in a fight between Leeds and Tottenham Hotspur fans in which a
Spurs supporter was knocked unconscious. He sees it now as a necessary shock to
the system. After taking stock, he got involved with the cancer charity
Candlelighters and helped raise almost £150,000 for local hospital facilities.
Leeds Crown Court sentenced him to 12 months.
“I went off the rails,” he says. “I was getting into
trouble, drinking and fighting. I got arrested which was a bad thing but also a
good thing. My sisters had a word and told me to sort myself out. I went for
some counselling and didn’t go through with all of it but the charity work
helped.
“It’s 20 years now but I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.
I feel everything: anger, sadness. And I still blame myself a lot.”
I say that as someone who was back at his hotel when the
stabbings occurred, he would be one of the last people to blame. “Maybe,” he
says, and his voice tails off.
The security guard — Kevin Fallows
The first the Leeds players heard of the incident in Taksim
Square was when phone calls started reaching them in their hotel. Leeds had
taken over an entire corridor at the five-star Kempinski and the squad were in
their rooms, ready to sleep ahead of the game the next night.
Kevin Fallows was the club’s head of security and travelled
with the players to all their fixtures in Europe. On each trip he would set up
a desk in the corridor where the team were staying, a point of contact in case
of any problems. Within an hour of the stabbings in central Istanbul, some of
David O’Leary’s squad emerged to speak to him.
“They’d turned on their tellies and it was all over the
Turkish news,” Fallows says. “The first I knew of it was when they came out to
tell me. What they were seeing was pretty graphic so we said to them, ‘Turn the
tellies off, go to bed and wait for us to get some proper details.’” The
footage was grainy and frightening, capturing a helpless Loftus with
bloodstains on his shirt.
Fallows is a security guard with ample experience. A
streetwise Mancunian, he has looked after Oasis, Noel Gallagher and Take That
and on the morning when we speak he’s at the First Direct Arena in Leeds,
organising staff for a gig by The Script. He has never spoken about his
memories of Turkey before but, like Andy Loftus, says he wants to reflect 20
years on.
Istanbul was like no other event he has dealt with. “The
only thing I could compare it to is the One Love concert in Manchester (held
after the terrorist bombing at the Manchester Arena in 2017) and that’s purely
because of how difficult the logistics of One Love were,” he says. “One Love
was a controlled situation. Bits of Istanbul weren’t in control. For some of it
we were relying on the police and the authorities without knowing if they were
going to do the right things.” Before England played Turkey in a European
Championship qualifier in Istanbul in 2003, England’s staff got in touch with
Fallows to ask for logistical advice. “I just said to them, ‘Good luck.’”
Galatasaray’s reputation went before them. Manchester United
and Chelsea had contested European ties at the Ali Sami Yen previously and
voiced complaints about their treatment, so Fallows increased the size of
Leeds’s usual security detail from three to five as a precaution. They had no
direct contact with Galatasaray’s security officials but Fallows and Harry
Stokoe, Leeds’s stadium manager, were able to visit the Ali Sami Yen the day
before the game to map the venue out. “Even then, it was meant to be closed to
the press but loads of them were there and they were being really intrusive,”
Fallows says. “I tried telling Galatasaray’s staff to get them out. They just
looked at me like I was stupid.”
Fallows is convinced that Galatasaray and the Turkish police
made deliberate attempts to rattle and unsettle away teams, forcing players to
squeeze through tight lines of officers to gain entry to the ground and
admitting thousands of home fans to the stadium hours before kick-off. The Ali
Sami Yen was in a league of its own in atmosphere terms, aggressive and
ferocious for visiting sides.
“A lot of what the police were doing was pure intimidation,”
Fallows says. “It was totally deliberate. One of our security lads had to go
with the bus to a compound, some sort of a lock-up. I had joked with him and
said, ‘At least you’ll be safe.’ He gave me a look and said, ‘Or maybe not.’
‘The attitude as far as I could see was, ‘Let’s intimidate
these lads and see what happens.’ Leeds back then had a lot of kids in their
squad. That’s what they were, kids. We tried to keep a lot of the information
about what had happened [to Speight and Loftus] from them, rightly or wrongly.
You were dealing with young lads and the last thing you wanted to do was scare
them.”
The morning after Loftus and Speight were killed, Fallows
and Stokoe were asked by Ridsdale to visit every hotel where the club’s
supporters were staying. Leeds always kept records of who was travelling and
which hotels they were using. The pair were met by angry, upset and bewildered
groups. They stressed as delicately as they could the importance of staying
indoors.
“I could see in their faces how much they were raging,”
Fallows says. “I didn’t want to be standing there telling them what to do and I
understood that they didn’t want to hear it. My sympathy was with them. But it
was common sense. We had to say to them as clearly as we could, ‘If you go into
the streets, if you go out drinking, we can’t tell you how dangerous it’ll be.
Trust us, this is only going to get worse.’
“It didn’t go down well, and I got that. It was the same at
the second leg when I had to stand and look after Galatasaray’s main man at
Elland Road. I got a lot of abuse for that and no wonder. I didn’t want to do
it either. Looking at it from where the fans were standing, I’d have been as
angry as them. But it had to be done.”
In the circumstances, did it surprise Fallows that the game
in Istanbul went ahead? “Surprise me? I was amazed,” he says. “Absolutely
amazed and totally stunned. Anywhere else in Europe, I doubt it would have been
played. I spent the whole night thinking, ‘What are we doing here?’ And when
the Leeds fans turned their backs to the pitch, total respect to them because
the football meant nothing. Any time I think about what happened, I ask the
same question. How can it be that two lads go to watch a football game and
don’t come back?”
As kick-off drew near, the drums and the noise from the
stadium filtered down to the Ali Sami Yen’s subterranean dressing rooms. The
design of the place meant the Leeds players had to take a long walk to the
tunnel, flanked by armed police. “Me and the security team tried to create a
bit of a cushion between them so the players weren’t worried about getting
batoned,” Fallows says. Soon, they arrived at a flight of steps and a spot
which would generate one of the lasting images of the entire tragedy.
“I stood there with Eddie Gray,” Fallows says. “We looked up
the steps and all you could see at the top was the dark sky and riot shields
around the entrance to the pitch. There isn’t much that unnerves me but that
was quite a scary moment. I looked at Eddie, he looked at me, we smiled a
nervous smile and both said the same thing: ‘Let’s go.’”
The team — Eddie Gray and Ian Harte
Eddie Gray is crouching down as he runs up from underground
and into the open air. Harry Kewell is in front of him, carrying a ball and
looking bewildered. Another picture, taken by the Yorkshire Evening Post’s Mark
Bickerdike, shows Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate stepping from the tunnel
with tangible shock on their faces.
Welcome to Hell, Galatasaray liked to say. Those April
nights were as close as Leeds will get to it.
Around them, riot police are standing with shields in the
air, protecting the players from what Fallows says was “all sorts of things
smashing off them”. Gray, one of O’Leary’s assistants, tried to focus his
attention elsewhere. “It felt to me like the police were trying to frighten
us,” he says. “I don’t know if the club encouraged them to do that but you were
well aware of objects hitting the shields. The atmosphere was electric — like,
scarily electric. I thought about Graeme Souness running and planting a
Galatasaray flag in the middle of the pitch at Fenerbahce. Jesus. He must have
been off his head.”
Ian Harte, the left-back, is more vivid in describing it.
“It’s the most terrified I’ve ever been,” he says. “Everything about that whole
occasion was shocking. The slit-throat gestures from fans as we arrived on the
bus. The way the police and the authorities were with us. And that’s without
even mentioning what had gone on the night before with the two lads who were
killed. I’ll be honest, by the time we were kicking off I had no idea why we
were playing. I don’t think a single one of the lads wanted to play that
night.”
For Leeds’s staff and players, the details of what had
occurred in Taksim Square the night before remained sketchy until after
full-time. They knew there had been trouble but the club made an effort to hold
back some detail on the basis that if the game went ahead, they would need to
concentrate on it. Gray remembers O’Leary going out of the team hotel to visit
a barber’s for a shave beforehand. Everything was muddled.
“In the first leg it was difficult to say, ‘Let’s get out
there do it for the two lads’ because we didn’t have the full picture,” Gray
says. “The second leg was totally different. By then, you knew exactly what had
gone on and you knew the severity of it. Two lives lost and two lives wasted,
for nothing. It sunk in quickly once we got home. A week or so later, we lost
4-0 to Arsenal. Your mind was elsewhere.”
Harte also felt a delayed reaction. He had been involved in
the plane crash which Leeds’ players and coaches escaped from on the way home
from a Premier League game at West Ham United in 1998. “For a couple of days
afterwards you run on adrenaline,” he says. “Then you get your head around
what’s actually happened. I was so pleased to get on the plane out of Turkey
but once I got back and thought about things, the reality of two lads dying out
there got to me. When the second leg came round, in the dressing room we were
trying to say, ‘Come on, let’s get stuck into them.’ But in the back of your
mind you’re putting football aside. It’s a game. Who really cares?”
Gray, a Glaswegian, was in the Celtic end with his wife
Linda on the day of the Ibrox disaster in 1971. The away crowd emptied after
Rangers’ late equaliser without realising what had unfolded inside the ground.
It was only when Gray arrived home that his parents asked if he was OK — and
told him about the many Rangers fans who had died.
“The Ibrox disaster was a tragedy, an accident,” he says.
“No one meant for it to happen. In Turkey, two supporters were murdered. It’s
completely different. As a family, I don’t know how you come to terms with
that.”
Inside the Ali Sami Yen, hundreds of Leeds’ supporters
attended the first leg as planned and were housed in a small section of yellow
seats. There was no minute’s silence or acknowledgement of the deaths. Holmes
was there and witnessed the entire away end turning their backs to the pitch
with arms raised, an act of silent defiance and dissent. “We’d spoken about
doing something beforehand,” he says. “It was obvious that Galatasaray were
making no concession for what had taken place, so that was our form of protest.
It was our way of making sure the cameras and the world took notice of us.”
To this day, it is used as a tribute every time the
anniversary comes round.
The road to justice for the Speight and Loftus families was
long and demoralising.
The man named as the prime suspect in the killings, a cafe
owner named Ali Umit Demir, was arrested by Turkish police within days and he
and three other Turks were later convicted in court. Loftus had been stabbed
five times and Speight twice. Both had numerous other wounds.
For long periods, none of those found guilty spent time
behind bars. Convictions were quashed, appeals were repetitive and it is far
from clear how much of their respective sentences were served. Demir lost his
last appeal in 2010 and was jailed for six years and eight months. In 2014 he
was spoken to by a Turkish website, a free man again. The interview included
vague expressions of regret but no apology to Speight and Loftus or their
relatives.
The Loftuses fought for justice for as long as they could.
“I stopped getting involved eventually,” Andy says. “We tried to raise
awareness but it was a farce. The Turkish police didn’t give a shit about us.
They didn’t care.”
The Speights were different and left the criminal cases
alone. “My mum struggled massively with it all and she still does now,” George
says. “She remarried and she’s carried on with her life but it’s still there,
every time you come up to my dad’s birthday or the anniversary. I respect the
Loftuses for fighting, 100 per cent. My mum just felt she had to move on.
Everyone’s different.”
A brass plaque commemorating Speight and Lofus was set into
brickwork outside Elland Road in 2001. It is unobtrusive and reads simply: “In
memory of Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight who died tragically in Istanbul, April
5th 2000. They will never be forgotten.”
Both families come here each April 5, to lay flowers and let
another year pass.
Andy has paid for the plaque to be cleaned a couple of times
and it could do with another polish now. But in the light of day, the sun hits
it and the sparkle lingers.