Panic in Italy: a school bus driver kidnapped and attempted to burn 51 live teenagers

I knew Ousseynou Sy, the Italian driver of Senegalese origin, "someone very polite, normal," he recalled. But today, he took out a knife and, according to several witnesses, he also had a firearm. After tying the two teachers to the bus doors, he asked the 53-year-old supervisor to tie the young men to the vehicle seats with cables.

She complied with the order but avoided attaching them completely so that they could break free, she said. He also claimed to remove the cell phones and made the children understand that they were hiding them. "By gesturing, I managed to make some children understand that it was better to have them with them," he recalls.

The driver then ordered him to empty two cans of gasoline in the seats and curtains, which frightened many teenagers. "They screamed, they cried, I could not calm them," he recalls.

Ousseynou Sy was very agitated and shouted strange things, some inexplicable, talked about Milan-Linate airport, said that he did not want to hurt them, and then that he was threat. "Nobody comes out alive from here!", He shouted several times, as some students remind us. "I did not stop saying that people would die in Africa," said one of the girls. "Yes, it's true, I was talking about children dying in the Mediterranean," confirmed the supervisor.

During the visit, the driver braked and restarted several times, some children took the opportunity to ask for help with the mobile phone. One of them said that he had first dialed the emergency number 112 without making them understand what was going on, so he called his father. Another called the mother: "Mom, we are in a bus, they take us to an unknown place (…) The driver wants to kill us, he has a rifle, he calls the police!", A-t- he declares.

Magarini also quietly dialed the school's standard number, so that a colleague listened to the children's panic screams. Several police tried to block the collective. "The kids hit the windows to ask for help," said Roberto Manucci, one of the first to intervene.

The driver dodged a first barrier for what ended up colliding with a car, before being blocked by other cars against the guardrails. While officers were distracting him from the front, other colleagues broke the vehicle's rear door as well as the window panes where the children escaped before the vehicle caught fire.

"I heard like a bomb in the back window and in two seconds a formidable team of agents took everyone away," recalls Magarini. In an amateur video, we can see children fleeing, screaming and crying. Armed with a lighter, Ousseynou Sy burned the vehicle shortly before being neutralized.

The supervisor was the last to leave. "It's in a second, I risked death," confesses Magarini, her back completely scuffed by the agent who saved her.

The Ministry of the Interior has announced that it will withdraw Italian citizenship, as provided for in the controversial measure approved last year by the right minister. Matteo Salvini to ensure security and stop the migration.