In Jeremy Bowen's account, two Russian aircraft skimmed the rooftops and attacked Minutka Square while the BBC team was separated across open ground. He sheltered behind a wall about a foot high until the explosions stopped. Scott then escaped through a ruined shop window, while Bowen and Steve struggled through the doorway with the tripod. A young Chechen whom Bowen had seen talking and smiling before the raid was killed. Fragments failed to penetrate the Land Rover's armored passenger compartment and windows, but pierced its unprotected radiator and forced the crew to find repairs outside the city centre. The rapid succession of explosions on the camera recording led them to infer that cluster bombs had been used. Bowen remembers the BBC initially giving the incident restrained coverage, then making its report more dramatic after ITN used the same footage to emphasize the crew's escape. Alex Clarke's closing assessment is that Russian weapons can be effective in urban warfare when casualty numbers are disregarded.
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A BBC crew survives an airstrike in Minutka Square
An airstrike kills a Chechen fighter and damages the BBC crew's armored vehicle; the crew later infers from its recording that cluster bombs were used.