The left side of her face was swollen, her left arm wrapped in gauze. In a preternaturally calm voice, she spoke on camera of how the gunmen in the Crocus City Hall music venue spotted her and a small group of people as they fled the carnage of the worst terror attack on Russian soil in decades.
"They saw us," she told RT, a Russian state-funded news agency. "One of them ran back and started shooting at people. I fell to the floor and pretended to be dead. I was bleeding."
The gunmen opened fire into some of the bodies as they lay on the ground, she said. "The girl lying next to me was killed." The gunmen then set fire to the hall, apparently hoping to kill all those left inside. "Then the flames flared up... I was lying under the door, breathing air. After some time, I crawled out... to the exit."
That was just one of the horrific stories to emerge in the deadliest terror attack in Russia since the 2004 Beslan school siege. In videos and eyewitness accounts, a picture of terror and confusion emerged as the men burst into the concert hall firing automatic weapons, shooting at point-blank range into prone bodies, then stalked through venue on Moscow's outskirts for nearly an hour as panicked concertgoers scrambled through the bowels of the building to find a way out.
On Monday, the Russian president Vladimir Putin conceded that the attack was conducted by "radical Islamists" but reasserted his earlier claims that Ukraine could have been involved in the shooting that left at least 139 people dead.
"We are interested in who ordered it," Putin said during a meeting with government officials, claiming that the shooting fitted into a wider campaign of intimidation by Ukraine.
This story is from the March 29, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the March 29, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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