Manchester — A night highly anticipated by Ariana Grande fans ended in blood and terror after police said a suicide bomber detonated explosives at the Manchester Arena.
At least 22 concertgoers were killed and about 59 others were wounded in the Monday night bombing, with six area hospitals treating the victims by Tuesday morning.
Shaun Hunter was with his daughters, Eva, 10, and Ruby, 12, who were wearing kitten ears like the star of the show, when the house lights went on. He called the rush of concertgoers after the explosion "a stampede."
"I saw one bloke carrying his daughter. She was bleeding," Hunter told The Times of London.
Andy Holey, who went to the arena to pick up his family, said the blast threw him some 30 feet through a set of doors.
"When I got up and looked around there was about 30 people scattered everywhere, some of them looked dead, they might have been unconscious but there was a lot of fatalities," he said.
Police gave no information about the attacker but said they were working to determine if there were any accomplices. Some of the dead were children, they said.
Grande, who had just left the stage, was unhurt, taking to Twitter to say: "From the bottom of my heart, I am so, so sorry. I don't have words."
Social media carried messages from families concerned about missing loved ones.
"Everyone pls share this, my little sister Emma was at the Ari concert tonight in #Manchester and she isn't answering her phone, pls help me," said one message posted alongside a picture of a blonde girl with flowers in her hair.
Ellie Ward, 17, made his way out of the arena after the blast, and found her 64-year-old grandfather, who had been waiting for him when the explosion happened.
"He said he only realised what had happened when he felt the side of his head and it was bleeding," the younger Ward told The Guardian newspaper.
"He's OK but he's cut his cheek," she said. "They said he had severed an artery. A lot of glass shattered on him."
"Everyone was screaming and running," Robert Tempkin, 22, told The Times. "There were coats and people's phones on the floor. People just dropped everything."
Elena Semino and her husband were waiting by the arena ticket office for her daughter when the explosion went off.
"My husband and I were standing against the wall, luckily, and all of a sudden there was this thing," she told The Guardian. "I can't even describe it. There was this heat on my neck and when I looked up there were bodies everywhere."
Despite wounds to her neck and a leg, Semino dashed into the auditorium in search of her daughter while her husband, who had only a minor injury, stayed behind to help an injured woman. She found her daughter Natalie, 17, and her friends safe.
"We ran and people were screaming around us and pushing on the stairs to go outside and people were falling down, girls were crying, and we saw these women being treated by paramedics having open wounds on their legs ... it was just chaos," said Sebastian Diaz, 19.
"It was literally just a minute after it ended, the lights came on and the bomb went off," Diaz said.
Police said the attacker detonated the explosives shortly after 10:33 pm at Manchester Arena, which has the capacity to hold 21,000 people. Children were among the dead, police said.
A video posted on Twitter showed fans, many of them young, screaming and running from the venue.
"We were making our way out and when we were right by the door there was a massive explosion and everybody was screaming," concert-goer Catherine Macfarlane told Reuters.
"It was a huge explosion - you could feel it in your chest."
Paula Robinson, 48, from West Dalton about 40 miles east of Manchester, said she was at the train station next to the arena with her husband when she felt the explosion and saw dozens of teenage girls screaming and running away from arena.
"We ran out," Robinson told Reuters. "It was literally seconds after the explosion. I got the teens to run with me."
Robinson took dozens of teenage girls to the nearby Holiday Inn Express hotel and tweeted out her phone number to worried parents, telling them to meet her there. She said her phone had not stopped ringing since her tweet.
"Parents were frantic running about trying to get to their children," she said. "There were lots of lots children at Holiday Inn."