Survivors Recall Stampede After Belarus Concert

Tanya Shelabina, 15, wanted to have some fun at a “beer concert,” an outdoor festival in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. It nearly cost her her life.

When rain and hail began to fall Sunday evening, 2,000 concertgoers raced to a nearby subway station for shelter. As they ran down the steps, some teenage girls in high-heeled shoes slipped and fell on the wet floor. From behind, people kept coming, trampling those who had fallen. The crowd surged forward through the narrow passageway, crushing and suffocating others. Police officers who tried to restore order were swept away and crushed too.

“Suddenly I was no longer running and my feet were not touching the ground, but I was still moving,” Shelabina recounted Monday. “I started feeling faint. It was like the air was cut off, and everything became foggy and dim. I was fading away, I was squeezed so tight by the crowd. I just passed out.”

In all, 53 people died--including 42 teenage girls and three police officers--in the worst tragedy to strike Belarus since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in 1986 sent a cloud of radiation over the country. An additional 158 people were injured, many of them suffering broken limbs, backs and necks.

“It is so inexplicably horrible,” a grim President Alexander G. Lukashenko said as he toured the scene of the stampede Monday. “It is a most terrible tragedy for Belarus. It is something unreal.”

The disaster appears likely to further tarnish the image of the impoverished country of 10 million people and its isolationist president, who has maintained power in part by repressing dissent. Critics quickly questioned why crowd-control police--who regularly break up pro-democracy rallies--were not deployed in sufficient numbers to handle a concert crowd.

At an emergency meeting of the country’s top officials after the tragedy, Lukashenko appealed to his foes not to use the event to further their political goals or divide the country. The president declared two days of mourning, assigned Prime Minister Sergei Ling to investigate the disaster and said the government will pay the cost of all the funerals.

“Please do not accuse or convict anybody,” Lukashenko said. “This is a mournful occasion for the whole country as well as for the families of the dead. Please do not allow this to split society or become an object of a political game.”

The “beer concert,” an annual event sponsored by a radio station and a brewing company, was staged at the open-air Sports Palace in central Minsk. About 10,000 people attended the concert, and witnesses said many members of the crowd were drunk.

When the storm broke, museum researcher Alexander I. Amelkovich, 24, was among those who ran for the cover of the Nemiga subway station.

“When I reached the passageway, I thought I was lucky to find cover from the torrent, but soon enough I realized I was in a grave and only a miracle could save me,” he said in a telephone interview. “The miracle was that I was pressed against the wall and that is why I didn’t fall like dozens of others. But there was no air there at all, and I think for a second I lost consciousness.”

The disaster was magnified by the arrival of a subway train full of people just as the crowd reached the station. As the passengers came through the tunnel, they were met head-on by the stampede of concertgoers. Bodies piled up in the passageway, and those on the bottom died, mainly of suffocation. Some of the passengers were among the dead, officials said.

“About 300 people were lying here--one layer, another one,” a police officer told Lukashenko during the president’s televised visit to the scene. “We were carrying out the first layer of people, and they were still alive. In the second one were the dead and injured.”

The steps leading down into the tunnel were littered with shoes.

Shelabina said she awoke to a police officer trying to help her up. “I couldn’t feel my body at all,” she said by telephone. “It felt numb and stone-like. I couldn’t move my fingers. I had pins and needles everywhere.”

After resting for a few minutes, Shelabina began walking home. “I heard sobbing and screaming and saw people running around me, and I heard sirens,” she said. “Maybe 10 minutes passed before I realized I was walking barefoot. I had lost my shoes, but I couldn’t care less. It finally came to me that I was lucky to be alive and walking on my own.”

Her friend Oksana Shalimo, who had attended the concert with her, was not so lucky. Shalimo, also 15, is hospitalized in a coma, kept alive by a respirator.

Anna Shalimo, Oksana’s mother, said she searched the city’s hospitals through the night for her daughter before finally finding her in an intensive-care ward, suffering severe brain damage.

“I was so relieved she was not dead,” the mother said, sobbing. “But now I am in agony again. She is there between life and death, my sweet little girl, and I can’t do anything to help her.”

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.