After 25 minutes of Leeds United’s match against Swansea City last Saturday, play was halted, supporters turned their backs as they did in Istanbul a quarter of a century ago, and the usually raucous Elland Road gave way to the poignant sound of applause.
On Thursday, the entire first-team squad, led by manager Daniel Farke, attended a memorial and laid wreaths beneath the plaque at Elland Road that simply reads: “In memory of Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight who died tragically in Istanbul. April 5th 2000. They will never be forgotten.”
The passing of time might be symbolised in the happy news that Speight’s son George – seven at the time of his father’s murder – is due to become a dad himself next month but the scars, both physical and mental, of Leeds’s most horrifying night can never fade.
“I got p---ed for seven years because I couldn’t face going to sleep due to the dreams and the flashbacks,” says Mark Valentine who, while trying to resuscitate Loftus as he lay dying from multiple stab wounds, recalls being beaten across the head with batons by police. “I didn’t really talk about it for about 16 years. I can remember everything clear as day – I can see the images now.”
Valentine was 30 when he travelled to Turkey in support of David O’Leary’s vibrant young team against Galatasaray. Now 55, he is still uncomfortable sitting with his back to the entrance of a bar or restaurant.
“It just gets a little bit too much at times,” said Andy Loftus, Chris’s brother, shortly after attending Thursday’s gathering at Elland Road with the current players. Like Valentine, he carries memories that no one should bear but is willing to speak for two reasons. He wants to honour his brother’s memory and address “lies” which have suggested that Leeds fans somehow provoked the carnage that night.
“My brother Daz was cradling our Chris as he was dying on the floor and the police were still beating them with batons... just beating the hell out of Leeds fans,” he says. “We had to go and identify the bodies. I was out of my mind obviously.
“Chris was just a daft joker. One of my last memories was him pulling faces across the bar – just being daft. I can see it now. I’ve gone full circle: Drinking, getting into trouble myself. I got diagnosed with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. I was in a really bad place. I’m obviously a lot better than that now. But it’s really draining.”
On Friday, the former chairman Peter Ridsdale was the guest of honour at Elland Road for a charity fund-raising tribute. The families have never forgotten his personal support that night inside Taksim Hospital and through the subsequent years. It is the first time that Ridsdale had returned to Elland Road for any sort of non-match-day event since he departed as chairman in 2003.
“There were no circumstances around that match that should ever happen,” Ridsdale now says. “I’ve never been so scared at a game in all my life. In the stadium, it was the most unsafe environment I’ve ever been in. With two of our lads murdered, you just have to look back and say, ‘Why the heck did we play?’ We should have got out of Istanbul as soon as we could. It wasn’t that simple at the time.
“There was nothing about that 24 hours that owes its place at any football match. It was horrific. Absolutely horrific.”
And yet Leeds United and their fans had earlier arrived in Istanbul full of hope and excitement.
‘When we got there, everybody was really nice’
After memorable trips to Moscow, Rome and Prague that season, they had reached their first European semi-final since Jimmy Armfield’s team were beaten in the 1975 European Cup final against Bayern Munich. ‘Welcome to Hell!’ signs had famously greeted Manchester United several years earlier at the Ataturk Airport but it was actually calm as hundreds of Leeds fans began arriving with the team.
Loftus had travelled with brothers Andy, Darren and Phil on the club’s chartered flight. The Leeds striker Alan Smith was seen chatting to Speight as they made their way through the airport.
Speight, who was 40, married to Susan and father to George and two-year-old Holly, was the landlord of the Bay Horse Inn in the Yorkshire village of Farsley. Loftus, who was 35, was a telephone engineer. Neither had any history of trouble at football.
“All four brothers would go to a lot of games,” says Andy Loftus. “We’d have a good laugh – we are a close family. There was nobody about at the airport. It was a case of all making plans: back to the hotel, and then we’ll all meet and go for a beer.”
Valentine remembers a similarly low-key arrival the day before the game. “When we got there, everybody was really nice,” he says. “Me and one of my pals ended up having a coffee with a Turkish lad. We were going around bars, having a drink.”
By the afternoon, Leeds fans had congregated at bars near the main Taksim Square. Andy remembers a good atmosphere – “no hassle at all” – and says a group of around 25 decided to find somewhere quieter as the evening approached so that they could watch the Champions League quarter-final between Chelsea and Barcelona.
“We had been followed by this group of shoe-shine boys, carrying their little bags and wooden boxes – we just thought that they wanted some money,” says Gareth Senior, another Leeds fan in the group. Andy left the bar early with his older brother Phil, who had been feeling unwell.
‘You couldn’t believe what you were seeing’
Valentine was also making his way towards Taksim Square to find a taxi back to the hotel when, in the words of Senior, it “turned into mayhem”. He says that Leeds fans leaving the bar were suddenly returning within seconds covered in blood.
“Knife wounds, slashes across their faces, cuts on their hands, cuts in the back of their legs,” he says. “You couldn’t believe what you were seeing. It literally was like a warzone.”
Valentine says that he saw a “huge” number of people with weapons who “didn’t look like football fans” running towards the bar with a camera crew following them.
“I could see people going on to the ground and I ran back,” he says. “I was trying to help Chris covered in blood and four or five Turkish police around me started hitting me with truncheons. I’m trying to give him first aid but there is a camera crew filming. There were people in the hotel watching it on the news.” They eventually got Chris into a taxi to the hospital.
Andy Loftus had heard from people returning to the hotel that there had been serious trouble. He immediately returned to Taksim Square before making his way to the hospital where Valentine was among those desperately still trying to help.
“Kev came in – I talked to him before he went into theatre,” he says. “Then the police came and arrested us all and I was put in a Turkish jail. I still had blood pouring out the back of my head.”
Valentine says that he was joined by a representative of the British Embassy who told him not to say that he was hit by local police in his statement.
Senior stayed in the bar trying to help the wounded, which included tourniqueting one fan who had become delirious because of the loss of blood. He was briefly also put in the back of a police van with makeshift ties before getting out when the police suddenly disappeared in another direction. “The guy whose bar it was hid me in the kitchen,” he says.
‘Outside the hospital it was chaos’
Ridsdale was in a floating restaurant on the Bosphorus Strait with his wife and officials of Leeds, Galatasaray and Uefa when news reached them that some Leeds fans were gravely injured.
The club’s operations and security director David Spencer told Ridsdale that he should not go anywhere near the unfolding turmoil. Ridsdale ignored him and they soon arrived at the hospital.
“Outside the hospital were a lot of Galatasaray fans shouting and screaming at us – it was chaos,” says Ridsdale. “All I did was what my instinct told me you do. I was chairman of the football club, a Leeds fan, we were in Istanbul… and two of our supporters were in trouble. It was right and proper that I did [go]. I ended up being a focal point for somebody to talk to because nobody else was talking to them [the fans].
“At that stage Christopher was already dead and Kevin was critical. We organised them to go out and get some blood, which they wouldn’t do without us paying. We paid on a credit card there and then. Christopher’s body was already in the temporary morgue and I was asked to go and identify. I had to get his brother to come down. That was horrific. It was something I’ll never forget.”
Speight would die in an operating theatre in the early hours of the morning. He had suffered 12 flesh injuries, including two stab wounds. Loftus had received 26 flesh injuries, including five stab wounds.
Ridsdale was later also taken from the hospital to a police headquarters where he met Uefa officials to try to get the match postponed.
“The Uefa official phoned Uefa but said, if we didn’t play, we would be thrown out of the tournament,” he says. “For good or ill, I didn’t think it was my responsibility to decide that Leeds were going to be thrown out of the tournament.”
The three Loftus brothers organised a flight home via Brussels to Leeds, where tributes, flowers and shirts were being left at the Billy Bremner Statue and gates to Elland Road.
‘People lining the street with cut-throat gestures’
Fans still in Istanbul describe a haunting day. “The police sent a bus and took about eight of us to do an ID parade at a station not far from the ground,” says Valentine. “We went in one by one, identified anyone we knew or thought we’d seen, and they just let us out and told us to walk to the ground. That was one of the scariest moments of my life. We stuck out like sore thumbs.”
Senior says it was like “hotel arrest” the following day before being bused to the ground. “The bus was attacked constantly – people lining the street with cut-throat gestures,” he says. “It was the same after and then they bused us straight to the airport – no security, and straight on to the plane on the runway. It was mayhem [on the plane] – people sitting on the floor, people hiding under chairs. It was like something from a nightmare.”
The players had heard just as they were going to bed the previous night that some of the fans had suffered life-threatening injuries. The gravity of the situation then became clear the next morning.
“By the time of the team meeting at the hotel, I could just tell with my young team that their minds were in a different place,” says then manager O’Leary. “There were really bad vibes. I was thinking how needless the game was and, because I wasn’t focused on it and couldn’t get them to focus, I remember thinking I’d failed them.”
The goalkeeper Nigel Martyn recalls lighters, stones and coins all coming down from the stands as the players came out on to the pitch between a corridor of protective riot police. Martyn’s biggest regret from a distinguished 846-game career is playing that match:
“Even now, I think if the club still played it, I shouldn’t have. Two guys have been killed… they are family men… they went to watch and didn’t come home.”
Martyn and O’Leary were among the 950 people at the tribute dinner at Elland Road on Friday night. Organisers have previously raised £140,000 for the local Candlelighters charity for children with cancer and hope to raise a further £25,000 this year. “I am humbled that the families wanted me to be there and, if I have been invited, I should go,” says Ridsdale.
‘People believe we did something wrong’
A recurring message from Leeds fans in Istanbul that night is that the violence was premeditated. Stories about Leeds fans disrespecting the Turkish flag or local women, they also say, were completely unfounded.
They point to the sheer number of people who attacked them, the range of weapons, the presence of a camera crew, the long road to any justice for any of the perpetrators and the ongoing difficulty in obtaining information from the authorities.
In 2010, four men were sentenced over the killings for between six and 10 years but it is unclear exactly how long they spent in jail.
“People don’t really understand what happened that night – they always believe the lies that we did something wrong,” says Andy Loftus. “That sticks in the back of the throat. We did nothing. You start thinking, ‘What are they actually keeping quiet here?’ How long do you chase justice? You are just dragging yourself through it over and over again.”
An inquest in 2004 did provide some comfort. Returning verdicts of unlawful killing, West Yorkshire coroner David Hinchliff described the policing as “disorganised, uncoordinated, not in control of the situation and ill-prepared”, saying that it had been a “pre-planned and orchestrated attack”.
Friends and family want this 25th anniversary to be a time when they can remember Chris and Kevin, support each other, and raise money for an outstanding cause.
Valentine will talk about his own experience of PTSD, flashbacks and depression, how he has learnt to manage his feelings, and hopes that might encourage others who are still struggling to process what happened.
Ahead of today’s 25th anniversary, a joint statement signed off with “love and best wishes from the family and friends of Christopher Loftus and Kevin Speight”, reads: “We cannot change history but what we have done is to keep their memories alive, do good things for great charities in their name and make sure that both Chris and Kev are never forgotten.”
A legacy of light, they all hope, can now come from the years of darkness.
