The victim of the terrorist attack spoke about the emergency exits at Crocus, which could not be opened

At least one group of people who tried to get out of the Crocus City Hall could not open the emergency exit doors, Muscovite Ekaterina Syrina, who was injured in the terrorist attack, told the Agency. Only after half an hour of wandering through the smoky and dark rooms, a little more than 10 people out of 40 who started the journey were able to get out, breaking through the wall and plexiglass. Other Crocus spectators also complained that the emergency exits were closed.

Details . As the woman wrote on her VKontakte page, after the attack began, she first lay between the rows and then climbed out into the hall. “The escalator went down to the right, to the left - the eye caught the inconspicuous “emergency exit” sign. A smaller part of the crowd separated towards him. There was no longer any leadership at this point. I chose the emergency exit. <…> But as it turned out, both paths led to death, only in different ways,” she wrote.

• As Syrina told the Agency, the emergency exit at the bottom of the stairs was locked. “We rushed back to the door through which we entered the stairs - it, too, was already closed. Since shots were heard there, we did not attempt to open it. We went upstairs. There was a plasterboard slope where the stairs ended - the man broke it, and we ended up in the utility room at the top. We sat there for a while, felt smoke and returned to the stairs,” says Syrina.
• Both doors on the stairs were closed again, she recalls. However, below they found a passage to another utility room. “In the light, the entrance to it looked like a wall, and then, when the light went out and we began to focus on something else, we realized that there was a flow of air going there, and we turned behind this wall,” said Syrina.
• According to the Muscovite, in the utility room they found another closed metal door, it did not give in, so the men decided to break through the walls using racks for fencing tapes. As a result, they managed to break through the wall and plexiglass, through which people got out into the hall, and from there onto the street. In the end, 12-13 people managed to escape, although initially about 40 ran up the stairs, she recalls. The woman does not know what happened to the others.
• As the Muscovite recalls, while she was looking for a way out, she felt that someone was lying under her feet. “I started tripping over people who were crazy,” Syrina wrote on VKontakte. In addition, as she was leaving the building, she saw several men in firefighter uniforms lying face down on the floor.
• For half an hour in the burning building, Syrina also witnessed a tragedy on one of the flights of stairs, where one panel was open. “It seemed like you could climb out onto the pipes and hide behind the drywall. However, upon closer inspection, I realized that the pipes would not support the weight of a person. <…> Someone tried to escape like this. Looks like a mother and daughter. Apparently, she sent the girl forward - and then inconsolable: she fell, fell! — the woman wrote on social networks.

Context . According to the latest data from the Investigative Committee, 137 people were killed during the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, three of whom were children. The terrorists shot only some of them, the rest died during the fire, unable to get out of the building. According to Baza, the bodies of at least a third of them - 42 people - were found in the toilet and on the stairs. Another viewer, who and his group escaped by breaking down the door, told the Agency that the emergency exits were closed.

The exits at Crocus were blocked, as evidenced by the story of concert attendee Dave Primov. “It’s a trap,” he says in the video. pic.twitter.com/HeB8tEmpci

— Agency News (@agents_media) March 22, 2024

• The owner of Crocus City Hall, Araz Agalarov, told reporters after the tragedy that “people had the opportunity to go out” due to the fact that “all fire protection systems, sprinkler systems, fire extinguishing robots are in good condition.”

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