Italian Driver Sets School Bus on Fire After Kidnapping Students

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/world/europe/bus-students-kidnaped.html

Version 1 of 2.

ROME — An Italian school bus driver took 51 seventh-graders hostage in northern Italy on Wednesday, pouring gasoline on the bus floor and later setting it afire.

After someone on the bus made an emergency call, Italian carabinieri, or military police, reached the bus and safely rescued all the children, as well as two teachers and a janitor aboard, as it burst into flames.

The driver, Osseynou Sy, an Italian of Senegalese origin, said that “he wanted to vindicate the dead of the Mediterranean,” according to Warrant Officer Marco Palmieri, a spokesman for Milan’s provincial branch of the carabinieri, Italy’s military police.

Mr. Sy, he said, was referring to the large number of migrants who lose their lives each year during the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 282 people have drowned that way this year.

A promise to curb migration from North Africa was a key factor in the election of Italy’s populist national government a year ago. Since then, the country — once a principal hub for migrants crossing the Mediterranean — has closed its ports to nongovernmental rescue vessels, to force other European countries to bear the burden of migrant landings.

The Italian interior ministry announced on Sunday that migrant arrivals were down 94 percent this year, compared to 2018.

Mr. Sy was arrested and treated at a Milanese hospital for burns on his hand. He was expected to be charged with kidnapping; arson; resisting arrest; intention to commit mass murder, because some students were still on the bus when it burst into flames; and terrorism as an aggravating factor, because he “created panic and threatened Italian institutions,” said Alberto Nobili, one of the Milanese prosecutors assigned to the case.

Mr. Sy told prosecutors that he had acted alone and that he intended to send a message to African immigrants “not to come to Europe, but at the same time to punish Europe for what he saw as its unacceptable migration policies,” Mr. Nobili said at a news conference in Milan on Wednesday night.

The students, who attend a middle school in Crema, a city some 50 kilometers, or almost 32 miles, east of Milan, were returning from gym class when Mr. Sy, a regular driver on the route, poured gasoline down the bus’s center aisle and announced that he was hijacking it and taking them to Linate Airport in Milan, investigators said.

He then gave zip ties to the three adults, ordering them to tie each child’s wrists together as he drove. As they went back the rows of seats, the adults left the zip ties progressively looser, another prosecutor, Francesco Greco, said.

Police in two carabinieri cars, tipped off by the phone call, forced the bus to stop on the Paullese provincial highway, but Mr. Sy rammed the cars again and again. While some officers tried to speak to him, others from a third military police car forced the bus’s side door open and broke the windows at the back to allow the passengers to flee.

At that point, Mr. Sy apparently ignited a lighter he was holding, officers said, and the bus caught fire as the hostages were escaping.

Italian television stations showed images of the charred skeleton of the bus, completely destroyed.

Asked why the adults did not try to overpower the driver, Warrant Officer Palmieri said that he could not speak for them, but that “the threat was very real.”

Mr. Sy was born in Senegal in 1972, investigators said, and became an Italian citizen in 2004. His wife, from whom he is separated, is Italian, and the couple have two children.

Mr. Sy had been working for the Autoguidovie bus company for 15 years, a company official, Corrado Bianchessi, said. He “never gave any particular signal” to indicate what he had planned, Mr. Bianchessi told the Italian channel of Sky News. “We are amazed,” he said.

Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, who is also Italy’s interior minister and a major opponent of illegal immigration, posted a tweet in which he said that Mr. Sy had a police record for driving under the influence and sexual assault.

“Why was someone with such record driving a bus for school children?” he asked. But prosecutors said the offenses were relatively minor.

Mr. Nobili said Mr. Sy had made a video explaining his actions on Tuesday. “He wanted the world to speak of this event,” he said, adding that prosecutors had no sense the episode was tied to “radicalized terrorism.”

He said Mr. Sy told investigators he wanted to board a plane to Senegal from Linate Airport, but it was unclear how he could do that or what he intended to do with the students, who were around 12 years old.

Mr. Sy told prosecutors he never wanted to hurt anyone, but Mr. Greco wasn’t buying it. “If we’re not crying over the death” of dozens of schoolchildren, he said, “it is thanks to the courage and rapid response of the carabinieri.”

“It could have been a massacre,” he told the Ansa news agency.