Ariana Grande had just taken her final bow, the house lights had come up and 18,000 concert-goers were filing cheerfully towards the doors when the excitable hubbub inside Manchester Arena was suddenly shattered.



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For a split second there was silence. Then the screams began. “Oh my God,” said one woman, who was filming at the moment the piped music was punctured by the blast. “What’s going on? What just happened?”

“The bang echoed around the foyer of the arena, and people started to run,” said 17-year-old Oliver Jones, who attended the concert with his 19-year-old sister. “I saw people running and screaming in one direction, and then many were turning around to run back the other way. Security was running out as well as the fans and concert-goers.”

Teenagers rushed for the exits, some clambering over barriers to drop into the stairwells. A woman in a wheelchair was trapped by the crowd, according to Karen Ford, who had taken her daughter to the concert. “She was absolutely hysterical, bless her, people were just pushing past her so I held them back while she got out of the stairwell,” she told the BBC.

“The problem was there were a lot of children there without parents; there was no one to calm them down.”

Play Video 0:22 Footage from inside Manchester Arena at moment of explosion – video

Terrifying as it was for the fans inside, it was those in the foyer just outside the concert hall who witnessed the full horror.

Andy Holey was waiting in the lobby for his wife and daughter, exchanging chitchat with a member of the arena staff, when he was flung nearly 10 metres through a set of doors by the enormous blast, he said. “When I got up and walked around, there were about 30 people scattered everywhere. Some of them looked dead, they might have been unconscious, but there were a lot of fatalities,” he told the BBC.

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He rushed to find his wife and daughter inside. “When I couldn’t find them, I went outside ... and looked through some of the bodies to try to find my family,” Holey said. They were eventually reunited outside.

Emma Johnson was waiting at the top of the foyer stairs for her two teenage daughters when she idly spotted, among the crowds, someone wearing an incongruous bright red top, under which were what she described as “risen bits” – the person she believes was the bomber. She said: “It was that which stood out because it was so intense among the crowds of people. As quick as I saw it, the explosion happened.

“Your ears – it is so loud. You see this flash of light and there was shrapnel everywhere. The glass exploded and people were screaming: ‘I have to get to my children.’

“All I think about is these poor families. Every time I close my eyes I envision a young girl crying for her mum because her head was in a pool of blood and her husband was trying to bring her around.”

Some witnesses described nuts and bolts among the bomb debris, suggesting the bomber may have packed the device with shrapnel to cause more injuries. Paul Dryhurst, from Sheffield, said his niece Claire Booth and her daughter Hollie, 11, had been caught up the blast.

“When the bomb has gone off the impact has broken Claire’s jaw and broken Hollie’s legs. They are both currently in hospital having nuts and bolts removed,” he said. Booth’s sister Kelly Brewster, who had been with them, was still unaccounted for, he said.

As the panicked crowds spilled on to the streets around the arena and the first of 60 ambulances raced to the scene, the city of Manchester rallied to help.

Hotels opened their doors to take in many of the young people who found themselves separated from friends and relatives or stranded following the lockdown of Victoria station next door. Taxi drivers switched off their meters to take people home, or ferry them to hospital.

AJ Singh, one of the drivers who had worked for much of the night, told Channel 4 News: “I’ve had people who needed to find loved ones, I’ve dropped them off at the hospitals, they had no money, they were stranded. We should come out and show whoever has done this: Manchester, we’re glue. We stick together when it counts.”

Off-duty doctors made their way to the eight Greater Manchester hospitals where the 59 casualties of the blast, many of them children, were taken. Others worked through the night, enduring what the prime minister, Theresa May, would later call “traumatic and terrible scenes”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa May walks with Greater Manchester police chief constable Ian Hopkins on Tuesday. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

On Twitter, the hashtag #RoomsforManchester was trending as locals offered refuge to those affected. “I’m three minutes from Victoria station with a comfy sofa, wifi, chargers and teabags,” began one message from Laura O’Connor.

But alongside the offers of help, social media was host to desperate messages from people whose daughters, brothers, partners and friends had been at the concert, and who had not managed to reach them after the blast.

Stuart Aspinall, 25, said he was trying to find his friend Martyn Hett after they were separated towards the end of the gig. Aspinall shared photos of the 29-year-old, from Stockport, on Facebook to help track him down.

He wrote: “The more news that is coming out, the scarier this is getting. There was an explosion at the Ariana Grande concert tonight in Manchester and I haven’t seen my friend Martyn since.”

Hett’s brother Dan said he was still missing on Tuesday afternoon.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Message on billboard in the city. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Many relatives frantically checked the hospitals where victims were taken. Outside the city’s Royal Infirmary, a 17-year-old girl, part of a family from the Philippines, told the Guardian she was looking for her mother, whom she had lost in the chaos after the explosion. Her mother’s partner had been injured, but she had no information on her mum.

Ellie Ward,17, had seen her grandfather at the hospital, after he was hit by shrapnel while waiting to collect her and her friend after the show. “He’s OK, but he’s cut his cheek,” she said, saying the 64-year-old had been hit by falling glass while waiting close to the merchandise stand in the corridor beneath the arena’s tiered seating. “He said he only realised what had happened when he felt the side of his head and it was bleeding.”

As Tuesday dawned on an unusually hushed city, dazed teenagers, some accompanied by their parents, stumbled from the city centre’s hotels in the hope of finally making their way home. Hayley Lunt, who had sheltered with her 10-year-old daughter, Annabel, at a nearby hotel, said they had not slept and were still shaken.

“It’s surreal. It’s almost like we weren’t there,” Lunt said. “It’s like a bad movie. I think it’ll take a few days for us to come to terms with it.”

The Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, who had been briefed throughout the night, spoke of the “evil act” that had occurred. “It is hard to believe what has happened here in the last few hours, and to put into words the shock, anger, and hurt that we feel today,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Burnham, left, speaks to media on Tuesday. Photograph: Dave Higgens/PA

“These were children, young people and their families that those responsible chose to terrorise and kill. This was an evil act.”

He paid tribute to those who had opened their doors and offered lifts to those affected, calling the city’s response the “best possible message to those who seek to divide us”.

“We are grieving today, but we are strong. Today it will be business as usual, as far as possible, in our great city,” said Burnham.

“Manchester has had some dark days in the past,” said Sir Richard Leese, the leader of the city council, adding: “I don’t think I can think of anything that matches the horror of what happened last night.”

An NHS blood donation centre on Norfolk Street in the city centre said it had been forced to turn people away, asking them to make appointments for a later date, such was the number of offers. Karen Hodgins, a nurse at the centre, said there was a queue of about 70 people on Tuesday morning. She said people were being turned away unless they had the blood group O negative.

“Most people are not the blood group that we need, which is O negative, the universal blood type. It’s not rare but it can go to anybody,” she said.

Waiting outside the centre, Adam Sharp, 25, said he had come along with his colleagues to “try and do my bit”. “I’ve registered before but have never donated,” he said.

Standing nearby was Jules Boyle, 24, with a large group of colleagues. She had woken to the news of the bombing. “I’ve never given blood before so I thought it was an appropriate time,” she said.

As the first names and photographs of the young victims began to emerge, the city remained on high alert. Shortly before noon, Greater Manchester police confirmed they had arrested a 23-year-old in Chorlton, in the south of the city. Armed police also sealed off Elsmore Road, a street in the Fallowfield area of south Manchester, and carried out a controlled explosion on the house of the man they later named as the suicide bomber, 22-year-old Salman Ramadan Abedi.

More than a dozen officers in unmarked cars and police vans also raided a flat in Whalley Range at about 12.20pm, believed to be the home of Abedi’s brother Ismael, who is 23.

Early on Tuesday evening, under a blue sky and a still-bright sun, thousands of people began gathering in the city’s Albert Square for a vigil, attended by faith leaders and political figures including Burnham, Rudd, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn and Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, to remember the dead and express a message of unity and defiance.

Lu Bowen, 40, brought flowers to lay, saying it had been a horrific day. Standing alongside her teenage daughter Lucy, she said: “We watched it all unfold last night. We felt we wanted to show a sense of solidarity and commitment that Manchester always has.

“When the chips are down, Manchester always pulls together.