Driver sets school bus on fire ‘to avenge migrants’

‘No one will survive. Stop the deaths at sea. I’ll carry out a massacre’

AN ITALIAN bus driver of Senegalese descent was arrested yesterday after hijacking his own vehicle and setting it on fire, allegedly threatening to kill more than 50 children on board whose hands he had tied.

The 47-year-old man said he was acting in revenge for the thousands of migrants, many of them African, who had drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years while trying to reach Europe from Libya.

“No one will survive,” he said, according to police. “He shouted ‘Stop the deaths at sea, I’ll carry out a massacre’,” said a police spokesman.

The man, named as Ousseynou Sy, was driving 51 children from their middle school near the city of Cremona to a sporting event when he started making threats.

In an ordeal that lasted around 40 minutes, he began driving towards nearby Milan. He rammed the bus into cars on a busy highway before it came to a stop at a roadblock set up by police.

He then doused the vehicle in petrol and set it on fire. Police smashed the windows of the bus to allow the children, aged 11 to 14, to escape.

“It was a miracle, it could have been a massacre,” said Francesco Greco, a prosecutor from Milan.

One of the children said: “He handcuffed us and threatened us. He said that if we moved he would pour out the petrol and set fire to it. He kept saying that people in Africa are dying and the fault is Di Maio and Salvini’s” – a reference to Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, the leaders of the two parties that make up the populist coalition.

At least 12 children were taken to hospital with bruises, smoke inhalation or because they were suffering from shock. The driver is likely to face charges of kidnapping, attempted mass murder, causing a fire and resisting arrest.