Screams and blank stares of shock: horror at the concert

Once they heard the shots ring out Friday night at Crocus City Hall, Efim Fidrya and his wife ran down to the building’s basement and hid with three others in a bathroom.

They listened as the shots continued and thousands of people who had come to a soldout rock concert on Moscow’s outskirts began screaming and trying to flee.

Horrified, Fidrya did the only thing he could think to do: “While we could hear shooting and screaming, I stood the whole time holding the bathroom door shut,” Fidrya, an academic, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “The others were standing in the corner so that if someone started shooting through the door, they wouldn’t be in the line of fire.”

They didn’t know it then, but they were sheltering from what became Russia’s deadliest terror attack in two decades, after four armed assailants had entered the popular concert venue and began shooting rapid-fire weapons.

Their story is one of many harrowing accounts that have emerged in the days since the attack, which killed at least 137 people. More than 100 injured people are hospitalized, some in critical condition, health officials said. For some family and friends of those still missing after the attack, news of their loved one was scarce.

Moscow’s Department of Health said Sunday it has begun identifying the bodies of those killed via DNA testing, which will need at least two weeks.

Igor Pogadaev was desperately seeking any details of his wife’s whereabouts after she went to the concert and stopped responding to his messages.

He hasn’t seen a message from Yana Pogadaeva since she sent her husband two photos from the venue. After Pogadaev saw the reports of gunmen opening fire on concertgoers, he rushed to the site, but couldn’t find her in the numerous ambulances or among the hundreds of people who fled.

“I went around, searched, I asked everyone, I showed photographs. No one saw anything, no one could say anything,” Pogadaev told the Associated Press in a video message.

He watched flames bursting out of the building as he made frantic calls to a hotline for relatives of the victims, but received no information.

As the death toll mounted on Saturday, Pogadaev scoured hospitals in the Russian capital and the Moscow region. But his wife wasn’t among the 154 reported injured, nor on the list of 50 victims authorities have already identified, he said.

Fidrya spoke of bursts of terror and of a long, tense wait. After about half an hour, it was so smoky that Fidrya, 42, thought even the assailants must have left. As he ventured out, he saw the body of a dead woman lying by the escalator. Later he saw the body of another woman, her distraught husband standing over her.

His group went down into the parking garage and eventually emerged on the street as emergency workers were carrying victims from the building.