Security boosted after bus windows shattered
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP): MILITARY POLICE in Rio de Janeiro are stepping up security after projectiles struck a bus carrying journalists to the main Olympic Park, the organising committee for the Games said.
While authorities said it was not immediately clear what struck the bus, a retired US Air Force captain who now writes about women’s basketball said she was certain it was gunfire.
Britain’s Press Association yesterday quoted Lee Michaelson, who was on the bus Tuesday, as saying that she instinctively hit the floor when she heard the sound of gunfire and “hollered to the others ... ‘Get down! Get down! We are taking fire’.”
“I know what a gun sounds like,” she said. “It was the sound before I ever saw the glass (shatter) or anything.”
MISTAKES MADE
The Rio organising committee said the driver heard a noise from inside the bus, which he thought was photography equipment falling down.
When he checked his rearview mirror, he found the journalists were lying on the ground. He saw a police car and stopped.
“At this time, he realised that two windows on the same side of the bus were broken,” the committee said in a statement. “He resumed the route under the escort of the police car and the broken windows began to give way further.” A member of the media stands near a shattered window on a bus in the Deodoro area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the 2016 Summer Olympics on Tuesday night.
Michaelson says both the bus The bus was travelling from driver and Olympic officials the northern venue cluster of made mistakes. The driver Deodoro to the main Olympic slowed down and pulled over, Park in the suburb of Barra da which she says is “precisely the Tijuca. opposite of what he should have The incident raises more done, which was to put the gas concerns about security at the on and floor it”. Games.
When they returned to the Rio is deploying about 85,000 Olympic park, she says there soldiers and police to secure the was no medical help waiting, Games, twice as many as despite some passengers being London did four years ago. injured and bleeding. On Saturday, a stray bullet
A dozen journalists on the bus flew through the roof of a suffered minor injuries.
media tent at the Olympic “There was kind of a popping
Equestrian Centre. Officials noise and something hit two windows on the side of the bus said it had been fired from a and left two hole marks, which hillside favela, but said the looked like bullet holes,” David Games had not been targeted. Davies, a photographer for the Organisers said the intended British-based news agency Press target was probably a security Association, told the AP. camera on a blimp.