Italy: Driver Hijacks School Bus, Torches Vehicle Full Of Children

Milan: In yet another horrifying incident, a bus carrying 51 school children was hijacked by its driver and set alight near Milan in Italy.

The driver, identified as a 47-year-old Italian citizen originally from Senegal, has been arrested.

According to reports, the students and their adult supervisors were being driven from a school in Vailati di Crema to a gym but the driver suddenly took a different route towards Milan’s Linate airport.

When the man started threatening the children with a knife, a boy secretly phoned his parents who alerted the police. The cops tried to intercept the bus which rammed into several police cars before slowing down.

Once the bus stopped, the driver jumped off and set it on fire, having already doused it in petrol. The children, some of them tied up, were rescued through smashed windows at the back of the bus and no-one was badly hurt. 14 people suffered from smoke inhalation.

“It was a miracle, it could have been a massacre,” Milan chief prosecutor Francesco Greco was quoted as saying.

A teacher who had been on the bus said the suspect – named by police as Ousseynou Sy – was known to be angry about Italy’s immigration policy and about the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean.

Post the incident, the AFP Agency reported that the Italian Government is investigating the possibility of annulling the driver’s Italian citizenship.

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