Flags yesterday flew at half-mast over Venice after 21 people including a toddler were killed when a bus careered off an overpass and caught fire.
“The bus flipped upside down. The impact was terrible because it fell from over 10m,” landing next to railway tracks below, Venice Fire Brigade Commander Mauro Luongo said.
The dead were thought to be mostly tourists returning from Venice’s historic center to a camping site on Tuesday evening.
Photo: Reuters
Fifteen other people were injured in what Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro described as “an apocalyptic scene.”
Firefighters said the bus was electric, despite the Italian interior minister earlier saying it ran on methane.
They spent hours extracting bodies from the charred remains of the bus, which was finally removed from the site early yesterday morning.
“Among the difficulties was the fact that the bus was electric, so it had batteries. Unfortunately, they caught fire on impact,” Luongo said. “That’s why operations took a little longer to remove the vehicle.”
Veneto President Luca Zaia, the governor of the Venice region, confirmed the official death toll was 21, “including a one-year-old child and a teenager.”
Five Ukrainians were among the dead identified so far, alongside a German, a Croatian, a Frenchman and the Italian driver, he said.
Five of the 15 injured are in a “very serious condition,” and some were still being identified, he said.
Firefighters said that the bus caught fire after careering off an overpass straddling a railway line and linking the mainland Mestre and Marghera districts of Venice in northern Italy.
Zaia said that flags on official buildings in the region would be put at half-mast because of this “tragedy of enormous proportions.”
As to the cause, Zaia said that “the main hypothesis at the moment is that the bus driver ... may have fallen ill.”
Investigators are analyzing surveillance cameras from the area as part of their investigation into what happened.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed her “profound condolences.”
“I am in contact with Mayor Luigi Brugnaro and Minister [of Infrastructure and Transport] Matteo Salvini in order to follow the news of this tragedy,” she said in a statement.
Corriere della Sera reported that 19 people died at the scene, with the remaining two dying in hospital.
Catholic Patriarch of Venice Francesco Moraglia was at the site where he blessed the dead, their bodies covered with white shrouds on which bouquets of red flowers had been placed.
French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered their condolences, while German Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock said that she was “deeply saddened by the terrible bus tragedy... In this night of grief, my thoughts are with the victims, their families and friends.”
In July 2018, a bus carrying a group of about 50 tourists to Naples fell off a viaduct near the city killing 40 people.
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