First published in The Times, April 17, 1989

With disbelieving eyes, we sat in the grandstand and watched almost 100 people die in front of us at an FA Cup semi-final. For a whole hour or more, from the time the match was halted after six minutes by a policeman running on to the pitch to instruct the referee to remove the players, we were captive witnesses, and partly accomplices, to a tragedy that is a consequence of collective incompetence in the organization of a sporting event.

Even as the game kicked off, circumstances were accelerating during a period of only a few minutes towards inescapable disaster as a bedlam of people funnelled into a tunnel feeding the terrace behind the Liverpool goal: a tunnel from which there was no retreat backwards, and no safety valve at the front end.These were not hooligans, nor were they, as at Heysel, the victims of mindless rivalry. They died, innocent white figures prost rate on the green grass from whom the breath of life had been crushed, because o f the fences built to restrain the mounting hooliganism of the past 25 years.

This was not like Heysel, where we watched incandescent Liverpool spectators charge at Italians, and drive them into a corner where a wall collapsed. The Heysel disaster arrived after a long and avoidable overture of threats on the terraces, and in its awfulness was quite quickly over. The Hillsborough slaughter had a sudden, swift arrival; and then a drawn-out macabre climax that was initially unapparent to Nottingham Forest supporters at the opposite end. They began by booing what they supposed was Liverpool hooliganism, and was in fact mortal agony.

Tragedy on the terraces

• 'Mayhem' after gate was opened

• 'We watched them die, innocent figures, lying prostrate and crushed on the green grass'

• Doctors attack 'total chaos' of rescue effort

Police in 'open gate' inquiry

• The man who opened the gate

• Force condemned for failing to avert turnstile disaster

• Senior officers were not willing to concede fault

Mother tells of losing husband and son as she witnessed crush on TV

• Names of the supporters who died are released

• Liverpool welcomes vindication of fans' behaviour

• Thatcher hears of heroic courage

Anfield Kop becomes silent focus of city's mourning

• Thousands at requiem mass as Liverpool mourns deaths

• Sombre lessons soccer failed to learn

We watched them die because the South Yorkshire police, with tragically misguided good intention, opened the gates at the northern, Leppings Lane, end of Hillsborough stadium, thereby sending a torrent of spectators into an already dangerously overcrowded central terrace behind the goal.

We watched them die because police, in scheduling their control of an identical fixture to last year, were more concerned with traffic flow outside the ground before and afterwards to have Forest at the larger southern Kop end near to the M1 - than with accommodation inside the ground.

Down at the front of the terrace, young people were crushed against barriers with a force exceeding half a tonne, yet for five or 10 minutes it look ed no more, from 50 yards away, than another crowd becoming restive as the match began. Steel fences buckled as they died.

Down on the pitch, as I moved among the carnage after the game had been halted, I saw mature policemen, sweat-stained in shirt sleeves from their efforts to relieve the victims and to bring back to life the lifeless, crying unashamedly at the hopelessness of a disaster that had overwhelmed them.

We watched them die on this black Saturday because the ambulances which arrived were too few and already too late; because the firemen and police could not reach the majority of the victims being trampled on underfoot, on account of the high, so-called safety fence separating them from the pitch; and because Hillsborough, a modernized but still old-fashioned ground, had little if any of the necessary life-saving equipment.

One of the police, who had been vainly pumping on motionless chests and attempting the kiss of life, said dispairingly: ``I had two of them just go on me as I tried. One of them seemed to start breathing again, but there was no oxygen available.''

Those who did not die, and were not either weeping at the loss of friends or limp with shock and pain, were angry. A group of them surrounded me, supposing me to be an official, and eventually had to be restrained by a policewoman as they made hysterical accusations to me against the FA and Sheffield Wednesday authorities for the disproportionate ticket allocation, and the police for opening the gates.

``They only care about the money,'' a Liverpool spectator screamed at me, a man aged about 30 and tidily dressed but trembling with fear and frustration. "They waved us through the gate, and there was already no bloody room in there. The police on the other side of the fence (by the pitch) were yelling at us to move back, but that was impossible. We were out of control. We are human. We've behaved ourselves ever since Heysel, but they go on treating us like animals.''