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Field on the South Side of the Road

Many people tried to hide in the fields next to the road when the attack started. Three eyewitnesses, all from the same car, believed that one rocket landed in a field next to the road, killing numerous civilians who were hiding there from the attack. It is unclear how many people were killed or injured by the rocket.

As soon as the attack started, people stopped their cars and tried to hide in the fields below the road. Some ran into a strip of forest nearby. One person said he hid in a pipe under the road. Malika Musaieva told Human Rights Watch:

Everyone left their cars and tried to hide in the field and ditches. People were in panic. We stayed in hiding for about ten minutes, until the planes left. When we got up, we saw other people coming from the woods. Some were injured.⁵⁰

According to Aslambek Magomadov and his relatives one rocket fell into a field on the south side of the Baku-Rostov highway, where many people were hiding from the attack. None of the eyewitnesses saw the rocket fall in the field but in separate interviews they all concluded that it had. Magomadov explained:

[The rocket must have] landed in the field, not far from us, because when they pulled me down wounded, I saw that under the embankment there were bodies, down there. There were bodies up there as well. I couldn’t see the explosion myself.... five dead bodies were lying right next to me, a woman, a man and three more bodies.⁵¹

Two other passengers from the car confirm seeing large numbers of dead bodies in the field. According to Zina Khamidova, “When I ran up to look what had happened to Aslambek, I saw that there were lines of dead bodies on the shoulder of the road. I don’t know how they got there. Maybe they rolled there or ran away.... It looked like someone had lined them up and shot them.”⁵² Her son Rustam said:

There were bodies all over the place: on the shoulder, on the road, in cars. I saw only bodies.... I ran like crazy together with some other people, looking for cars to take away people.... [I could tell the living from the dead because] the living were moving. For example, when the planes flew by, they would cover their heads with their hands, would hide, would run.

I saw how rockets exploded on the road and on the shoulder. There were fields and a small strip of wood. If it hadn’t been for that strip of wood, many more would have died still. People hid, tried to dig themselves in the ground, one could say. Many died on the shoulder, some were taken down from the road.⁵³