Abducted kids rescued from bus in Italy
MILAN — A bus driver in northern Italy abducted 51 children and their chaperones Wednesday, threatening them during the 40-minute ordeal before setting the vehicle on fire when he was stopped by a blockade, police said.
Officers broke glass windows in the back of the bus and got all the passengers to safety without serious injury before the flames destroyed the vehicle, authorities said.
As he was apprehended, the driver, identified as Ousseynou Sy, said he was protesting migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Cmdr. Luca De Marchis told Sky TG24.
De Marchis said Sy, an Italian citizen of Senegalese origin who’s in his 40s, threatened the passengers, telling them that “no one would survive today” as he commandeered the bus carrying two middle-school classes to a gym in Cremona province, about 25 miles from Milan.
The Italian news agency ANSA quoted one of the students as saying the driver took everyone’s phones and ordered the chaperones to bind the students’ hands with cable ties, threatening to spill gas and set the bus ablaze. The news agency said the chaperones only loosely bound several students’ hands, not everyone’s.
Authorities said an adult called an emergency operator while one of the students called a parent. Authorities were then alerted, and roadblocks were set up. The bus was intercepted on the outskirts of Milan by three vehicles from the Carabinieri law enforcement agency, which were able to force it into the guardrail, De Marchis said.