The horror they experienced on Friday afternoon inside the Crocus City Hall when gunmen opened fire while dozens of citizens were having fun, are described by eyewitnesses who managed to be saved.

A girl describes her experience to Russia Today, revealing that she pretended to be dead to save herself. With a trembling voice, she describes the moment when gunmen at the Crocus City Hall music venue spotted her and a small group of people leaving the venue.

“They saw us. One of them ran back and started shooting people. I dropped to the floor and pretended to be dead. I was bleeding,” she said, pointing to her temple.

The gunmen opened fire on some of the bodies as they lay on the ground, he added. “The girl next to me was killed. Then they lit a fire. They closed the front door, but they probably couldn’t close the lock,” said the girl, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I was lying under the door and I was breathing. After a while, I crawled out, three minutes passed, maybe four. I looked around, crawled towards the exit. I realized that no one was there and I went out.”

27-year-old Arina, a clinical psychologist from Moscow, described to the Guardian what she experienced.

“At one point we heard a big bang outside the hall, we thought it was part of the concert,” Arina said. “But at some point we realized something was wrong, we realized there were shots being fired.” Soon after, Arina saw a man in camouflage clothing enter the concert hall holding an automatic rifle.

“We all lay down on the ground. I looked next to me and saw many injured people covered in blood.”

Arina described seeing a woman trying to talk to her husband before she was shot at point blank range. She herself managed to escape from the concert hall and then fell down an escalator.

“On the way down, I saw blood on the floor everywhere and lots of dead bodies. Some people tried to carry those who were unconscious,” he said.

Alexander was also in the concert hall at the time of the attack. “They didn’t say anything. They started shooting the people in front of them.”

Another man described how he and others were locked in a toilet which began to fill with smoke. To escape, they broke through the plasterboard walls and descended along the pipes to the lower levels of the building, then broke through a window to escape.

Yulia Kharitonova and her boyfriend were late to the concert. As they rushed into the hall shortly after 8pm, the gunmen opened fire.

“It turned out to be right behind us,” he told the Astra channel. “We entered… and there were not many people there, (the gunmen) shot and ran to where there were more people. I was shot in the shoulder, my friend was hit in the arms and legs. A woman with a bullet in her temple fell right next to me,” he continued.

“A cheerful woman was selling tickets at the entrance and when we ran to leave we saw her lying with the tickets in her hands and a bullet in her head. I still have that image before my eyes. We walked over the bodies through the same doors we came in, we heard sirens, the police and ambulances were coming.”