‘I fell to the floor and played dead – gunmen shot people beside me’

There were some miraculous escapes – but the gunmen were attacking unarmed civilians at a concert

Moscow’s Crocus City Hall was packed to the rafters on Friday night as fans of Picnic eagerly awaited the Soviet-era rock band’s arrival on stage.

The musicians were still in their dressing room when gunshots rang out. At first, the audience thought it was part of the show. Then gunmen burst through the doors. Videos on social media showed four or five men in bulletproof vests and armed with assault rifles entering the large, marbled concert hall. They carried a large cache of weapons and shot indiscriminately at people.

“They acted like trained fighters,” one eye witness told a Russian news channel. “They killed the guards standing at the door. Then they blocked the main entrance.”

Graphic footage shows the gunmen firing on those trapped in an entranceway to the concert hall for a full minute at point-blank range. The attackers then threw an explosive device into the crowd, starting a fire which eventually burnt through the roof of the building.

People described how they played dead to survive or had other miraculous escapes. One woman interviewed on Russian TV while in hospital being treated for burns to her hands and body said: “I fell to the floor and pretended to die. The girl next to me was killed.”

Yulia Khvatkova was running late for the concert and dashing to catch the start of the show with her boyfriend. She didn’t realise was that the gunmen were behind her. They opened fire just as she reached the concert hall entrance.

“I was wounded in the shoulder, my boyfriend was hit in the arms and legs. A woman fell right next to me with a bullet through her temple,” she told the Astra news agency.

“A cheerful woman was selling tickets at the door. When we ran off I saw her lying there with these tickets with a bullet in her head. I still have this picture in front of my eyes.”

Anna was also about to enter the concert hall with her parents when the shooting started.

“We were literally three steps away from the entrance when a man fell down dead in front of me,” she said.

“People started shouting: ‘Run, they’re shooting’. We didn’t realise it at first, as it sounded like fireworks.”

Inside the hall, built to accommodate 6,200 people, the crowd dropped to the floor in a desperate bid to dodge the flurry of bullets, some attempting to crawl under seats through the thick smoke to the exits. Many did not make it that far. Footage from the scene showed scores of bodies slumped over seats or on the ground.

Elena (61), said one man “saved a lot of people” after he tackled one of the gunmen. She was hiding under a seat, watching an attacker near the stage shoot people when she saw a man grab his assault rifle and beat him with it.

“He gave us the chance to all go out through the stage, through the emergency exit and out into the street. He saved a lot of people. I don’t know if he’s still alive.”

The attackers then started setting fire to the hall, according to Vitaly, an eyewitness quoted by the BBC. “They threw some petrol bombs, everything started burning. We were led out towards an exit.”

Children were in the complex at the time of the attack, taking part in a ballroom dancing competition. © Telegraph Media Group Ltd