Red Cross chief confronts Heysel 20 years on

Returning to Heysel for the first time since the 1985 disaster, Red Cross veteran Jacques Van Camp can almost see it unfolding again.

"When we arrived it was war. For me, it was like war," Van Camp told Reuters in an interview at the rebuilt and renamed King Baudouin Stadium.

"I've never returned - this is the first time in 20 years... I would say that it really psychologically traumatised me," he said as the terrible drama played out in his mind's eye. "I can almost see it again," he sighed.

Van Camp spent the evening of May 29, 1985 supervising hundreds of volunteers as they struggled with the disaster that killed 39 football fans, mostly Italians.

As the Heysel stadium prepared for the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus, a wall collapsed after a charge by the English club's supporters.

Van Camp stared into the area of King Baudouin stadium where Heysel's doomed Block Z once stood.

"It was really crazy," said Van Camp, who in 1985 was head of the Red Cross's central ambulance service. "People were crying, running, agitated, screaming.

"There were people crushed one against another, people stretched out over the barriers, people trapped underneath."

"When you're confronted with something like this, you don't reflect - you act and you intervene," he said.

Van Camp arrived with a second wave of ambulances and volunteers to bolster the 80 personnel and 10 ambulances already at the ground, when it became clear that a serious emergency was unfolding.

The bespectacled 58-year old, who now runs training courses in first aid for the police and others, oversaw more than 300 volunteers that night. "I was more of a manager so I couldn't look after one or another victim because I had to organise the aid," he said. "We tried, whoever could, to resuscitate them - the police, the firemen, the paramedics."

Van Camp said he had had a "sixth sense" earlier in the day that things would turn sour. "I sensed it that it was going to turn bad. I don't know how to explain it," he said.

By five o'clock that afternoon, Brussels hospitals had already received 24 patients injured in fighting between supporters of the two clubs, he said.

Following the Liverpool fans' charge, Italian fans piled up, crushed and clambering over each other.

"It was like an enormous game of dominoes," he said.

Van Camp, who joined the Red Cross aged 12 and has spent all his working life there, recalled the dead, some blue from asphyxiation, some frothing at the mouth Emergency services tried to keep control of the disaster by hiding the dead, hoping to stave off a much wider confrontation.

"We evacuated them on stretchers, whatever we could find, as if they were wounded," Van Camp said. "We put up several tents, and we put all the bodies in these tents, above all so people would not realise exactly what had happened."

The match went ahead - something that many later questioned - but Van Camp said it was vital to distract other fans and allow the emergency services to regroup and transport away the dead and injured.

"They had to play this match," he insisted. "If all of these people had started to fight... there wouldn't have been 39 deaths, there would have been hundreds of deaths and thousands injured."

Nine years after the Heysel disaster, the run-down stadium was torn down. It reopened a year later as the King Baudouin stadium. Van Camp said he felt "shivers" on returning, even to the new-look ground. "Happily it has completely changed," he added.

Alongside a 1967 fire at a Brussels department store, which killed more than 320 people, Heysel was the most awful day of his life, Van Camp said, calling it "unforgettable".

"A lot of the victims were young people, that was what was also so terrible... coming here to have a good time and never returning home," he said. "I swear, until my last breath, I will never forget it."