As emergency services combed the scene of the attack on a concert hall in Moscow, details on some of the victims began to emerge from officials and local news media.
Most of those identified so far appeared to be in their 40s, and many had traveled from other parts of the country to attend the concert where Piknik, a Russian rock band formed in the late 1970s, was slated to perform Friday night.
Alexander Baklemyshev, 51, had long dreamed about seeing the band, his son told local media, and had traveled solo from his home city of Satka, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, for the concert.
Irina Okisheva and her husband, Pavel Okishev, also traveled hundreds of miles to attend the concert — making their way from Kirov, northeast of Moscow. Okishev had received the tickets as an early birthday present. He was due to turn 35 next week, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported. It said both he and his wife died in the attack.
“Very painful and scary,” Okisheva’s colleagues wrote on a social media page for a photo studio where she worked. “The whole studio team is horrified by what happened.”
Anastasiya Volkova lost both of her parents in the attack. She told 5 TV that she had missed a call from her mother Friday night at around the time of the attack. When she called back, there was no response, Volkova said.
“I couldn’t answer the phone. I didn’t hear the call,” Volkova told the broadcaster, adding that her mother had been “really looking forward to this concert.”
As the death toll climbed to 133 people, the Moscow region’s health care ministry published a preliminary list of victims. It had 41 names; Andrey Rudnitsky was one of them.
A forward in an amateur hockey league, he turned 39 last week, according to his page on the league’s website. Rudnitsky’s teammates told a local news website, Pro Gorod, that he had moved to Moscow last year from Yaroslavl but planned to return home to play there. Rudnitsky had two children.
Ekaterina Novoselova, 42, was also on the list of names from the Moscow region’s health care ministry. Novoselova won a beauty pageant in 2001 in her home city of Tver, 110 miles northwest of Moscow, one of the pageant organizer’s told the local news outlet TIA. It reported that she had moved to Moscow to work as a lawyer and is survived by her husband and two children.
Some people appeared to have been named by mistake. Yevgeniya Ryumina, 38, told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that she had fled the concert hall to safety. But she had lost her ID, Ryumina said, suggesting that might have led to confusion.
