Like sad memories of Bataclan in Moscow.
Friday evening, at least 115 people were killed in an armed attack followed by a huge fire in a concert hall in the Moscow suburbs, later claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).
A terrorist attack reminiscent of that which targeted the Bataclan on November 13, 2015 in Paris, during which 90 people were killed and several hundred injured during a concert by the rock group Eagles of Death Metal.
VIDEO.
Moscow: “bloody attack” in a concert hall leaves at least 93 dead
A little over eight years later, it was in the Crocus City Hall, located 16 km from the center of the Russian capital, that Islamist terrorists struck, while the rock group Piknik was to perform in this large hall the concert.
A Russian-speaking audience
Little known to the French public, Piknik is a Russian rock group born in 1978 in Saint Petersburg, a city which was still called Leningrad.
But musicians believe that the group was officially founded only in 1981, when Edmund Shklarsky became its leader.
According to the latter, the group's audience is almost exclusively Russian-speaking.
Initially launched by students from the Polytechnic School of Russia's second largest city, the group released its first album entitled "La Fumée" ("Dym") in 1982, and enjoyed its first success a year later. later becoming a laureate of the Leningrad Rock Club Festival.
Since then, the group has released 26 albums and experienced numerous breakups in the 1980s and 1990s, without ever disappearing.
Read alsoShooting in a concert hall in Moscow: images of the Russian capital on alert
Since 1981, the singer, guitarist and songwriter has been Edmund Shklarsky, accompanied on drums by Léonid Kirnos since 1983, on bass by Marat Korchemny since 2003 and on piano by Stanislas Shklarsky since 2007. If their last album dates back to 2011, the group is still active since it has just released a song entitled “Nothing, Don't Be Afraid of Nothing”.
One of the group members has disappeared
Their style of music is a mix of art rock, progressive rock and original Russian rock, with the musicians using electronic keyboards as well as folk and exotic instruments.
Except for some of their early songs which were written in Polish, the band always sings in Russian.
In 2016, the band was banned from performing in Ukraine because they were still performing in Crimea after its annexation by Russia.
For the moment, the fate of the musicians who were preparing to go on stage at the time of the attack is not yet known, but at least one of them has disappeared, according to the Russian press agency Tass.
“There is still no information about the member of the Piknik group who disappeared during the Crocus terrorist attack,” said the group's concert director Yuri Chernyshevsky.
“We can't contact one of them, we don't know if he left Crocus,” he said, without specifying which of the four rockers it was.