Bus driver abducts 51 children in Italy, then sets fire to vehicle

MILAN — A bus driver in northern Italy abducted 51 children and their chaperones Wednesday, threatening them over a 40-minute ordeal before setting the vehicle on fire when he was stopped by a Carabinieri blockade.

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 said he was protesting migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Commander Luca De Marchis told Sky TG24.

De Marchis told Sky TG24 that the driver — identified as Ousseynou Sy, an Italian citizen of Senegalese origin in his 40s, by ANSA, the Italian information agency — told passengers that “no one would survive today” as he commandeered the bus carrying two middle-school classes to a nearby gym in Cremona province, some 25 miles from Milan.

ANSA quoted one student as saying the driver took their phones and ordered the chaperones to bind the students’ hands with cable ties, threatening to spill gas and set the bus ablaze. ANSA said the chaperones only loosely bound several students’ hands, not everyone’s.

One student described the ordeal on La Repubblica TV, his face obscured due to his age. His name was not given.

“We were all very afraid because the driver had emptied the gas canister onto the floor (of the bus). He tied us up and took all the telephones so we could not call the police,” the student said.

One phone fell, enabling the hostages to call Carabinieri and the police, the student said.

Authorities set up roadblocks, and the bus was intercepted by Carabinieri vehicles.