“Crocus City Hall” attack: "I watched the line of fire moving towards people."
The BBC talks to people who witnessed the attack on "Crocus City Hall" - and those who escaped it. Many thought they were hearing fireworks before the concert. Until they saw the gunmen.
By Anastasia Platonova, Sergey Goryashko.
Crocus City Hall is one of the biggest concert venues in Moscow. It can accommodate up to 6,200 people. It was sold out on Friday evening, packed with thousands of people who had come to listen to the Soviet-era band ‘Picnic’. Just before the music was due to start, unknown attackers stormed the concert hall, opening fire with automatic weapons. Official figures put the number killed at 115 (at the time of publishing this blog), the number of victims most likely to grow. We spoke to some of those who were caught up in the incident.
The attack began around 8pm, just before the band was due to start performing. Most of the ticket holders were already in the auditorium. Sofiko Kvirikashvili had come with her husband: “We were seated in the sixth row of the VIP box,” she says. “There was some music playing and the big screens were showing adverts for upcoming concerts. The second bell rang, and the hall was more than half full.”
Photographer Dave Primov was also in the auditorium when the shooting began. “We were on the balcony upstairs. Ten minutes before the concert started there were already a lot of people gathered. It was 70% full.”
Eva is an assistant to the dance group whose members were due to take the stage at 8pm. “Five minutes before the performance, we starting getting the guys ready the other side of the curtain. I was in the dressing room behind the scenes,” she says.
Those who were already in the auditorium, and had not seen the unknown individuals enter the foyer and start firing, did not at first understand what was going on.
“We didn’t know these were gunshots. I thought it was some fireworks going off. Some kind of endless salvo - maybe firecrackers?” says Sofiko. “I looked around the auditorium once, then a second time. And the third time I realised that everyone was starting to scatter in different directions.”
Dave Primov the photographer says he had same thought to begin with. “We heard what seemed like the sound of fireworks. And my friend who was with me at the concert said the same – ‘Fireworks, maybe?’ And after that we could see people creeping in a crowd along the lower part of the hall, close to the stage, like a little train. I couldn’t understand what was happening.”
“As someone who works in the film industry, the sound of gunfire didn’t scare me. At first, I didn’t understand a thing, though,” says Eva. “We were in the dressing room and this crowd rushed past us. We heard the noise, people running in the corridor, so we grabbed our coats and dashed outside along with the crowd.”
Sofiko and her husband were sitting in the stalls and got out of the auditorium via the stage. “My husband gave me a shove first and said ‘Run, I’ll catch you up.’ We didn’t run but calmly walked behind the stage and then through a service entrance onto the street. Someone in the crowd screamed that a maniac was shooting people.”
She says that security guards at the venue were calling on people over the radio to run toward the stage. “A lot of people ran with us, but the crowd hadn’t begun to panic yet. I waited for my husband in a corridor and we ran to the street and made it to the car.”
Dave Primov was on the balcony of the concert hall auditorium when the gunmen entered.
Eva also said that security was quick to open up all the exits. “They were professional and took charge of everyone, telling them not to panic. I was just carried away with the crowd,” she recalls. People escaped from the concert hall through the adjacent shopping centre, she says.
Those seated higher up who hadn’t managed to escape immediately through the stalls and stage left by another route.
“The noise of the ‘fireworks’ got louder and closer and people started panicking in the hall, began to scatter in different directions, colliding with each other,” says Dave Primov. “There wasn’t any evacuation at all.”
At that moment, shooting started in the auditorium itself, to the left of the stage. Sitting on the balcony with his friend, Dave Primov watched the attackers as they entered the room.
“There were bursts of automatic fire at the crowd. They went from the entrance through the stalls towards the stage, driving people towards the centre of the auditorium. I watched the line of fire moving towards people.” Primov recalls.
“Everyone started lying down on the floor, we started lying on top of each other in the aisles, and started trying to organise the crowd so we could move forward,” he says. “But at the same time we knew they could enter with machine guns from any door, so we tried to find the nearest exit upstairs. Slowly, waddling like geese, crawling, moving forward, we crawled out and up and began to leave.”
Dave says the crowd tried to get away from the sound of the gunshots. “We ran into the service area of Crocus, towards the balconies. But we just faced a series of locked doors, so people panicked and some were crying, some were calling their relatives, and some were waiting for the lifts, which weren’t working. We ended up in some kind of big, dark room.”
People discovered an exit and service ladder, but the door leading to it was locked. The spectators managed to break it down and get out into the street. The escape had taken roughly 25 minutes.
While some witnesses say security guards behaved professionally, opening all the doors to aid the evacuation, others were less fortunate.
“I was running past the façade of Crocus and saw people running and bashing on the glass, unable to get out because all the doors were shut,” says Dave Primov. By the time he exited, the concert hall was already on fire, and he could smell the smoke and burning.
Sofiko and her husband fled to the street and had reached their car a little earlier. “At that point, we had no idea someone was shooting, that there were lots of them. We got away quickly, and it was only when we got to the Zhivopisny Bridge that we saw the news, and I called my mum.”
Eva and her colleagues exited through the shopping centre and crossed the Pavshinsky Bridge towards Zhivopisny Embankment. “By the time I crossed the bridge, the building had already caught fire. Those who came after me talked about an explosion but I don’t know what caused it.”
It was only by 1am that emergency services managed to contain the fire. “I live a kilometre away from Crocus, helicopters were constantly flying back and forth, gathering water from the river to try to put out the fire,” says Ekaterina, a local resident.
“It was like I was in some kind of action film,” says Alexei (name changed at his request) who lives opposite Crocus on the other side of the Moscow ring road. He was coming home from training when the shooting began at the concert hall.
“Friends and work colleagues started phoning me to see if I was OK. I could hear explosions as I walked along but thought it was to do with the fire,” Alexei says. Around midnight, he saw the helicopters making circuits to pick up water and dump it on the roof of the concert hall.
“I had friends in there. I got this message from one: ‘My wife and I survived. It’s our second birthday.”
Read this story in Russian here.
English version edited by Chris Booth.