MOSCOW, April 3. /TASS/. Nikita Ivanov, 17, who helped lead people out of the Crocus City Hall building during the March 22 terrorist attack in Moscow's outskirts, was not supposed to be at work that day, and when he told his mother about the emergency, she did not initially believe him.
"At first, I thought that he was joking. He called me and said: 'Mom, there is shooting, there are explosions.' I did not even understand where he was, because he was not supposed to be there," Viktoria Ivkina told the TASS Kids project in an interview. She said that she was unaware of the attack until her son called her. After getting the news from him, she turned on the TV and didn’t turn it off for three days.
Nikita, who was working in a cloakroom at Crocus, explained that he wasn't expecting to work that day. "Our lessons were canceled. Realizing this, I immediately signed up for the job. And, consequently, went there the same day," he said.
Nikita admitted that he was in a stupor when the attack began. "Initially, I considered not leaving the cloakroom, because I thought the emergency services were already there, and we would have to keep working. But when I realized the seriousness of the situation, I ran. There was a service exit, but when I managed to squeeze through the crowd, I started running in completely the wrong direction. Later, they told us that we should leave through the employee exit, and I started escorting people there," the teenager said.
On March 22, terrorists attacked the Crocus City Hall concert venue just outside the Moscow city limits. According to the latest data, 144 people were killed and 551 suffered injuries. The Russian Investigative Committee said it had found evidence that the attackers were linked to Ukrainian nationalists.