The first to the scene of the accident near Venice, in which 21 people died, including four Romanians, after the bus fell from the bridge, were two young people who live nearby, the BBC reports.

Boubacar Toure and his flatmates thought it was an earthquake when they heard a loud thump near their house.

Only after they opened the window and heard someone shouting that “the bus has fallen” did they realize that a tragedy had happened.

“I ran to where the bus was on fire and I heard a woman screaming, ‘My baby, my baby,'” said Boubacar, 27, who is originally from The Gambia.

“I managed to pull her out of the window and then I pulled out her son who was badly burned but still alive.”

He tried to extinguish the flames with a fire extinguisher in the bus

The boy said that he took a fire extinguisher from the bus to help extinguish the flames, but the fire was too strong. Those around him tried to help him, but in vain.

“Passers-by gave me other fire extinguishers, but nothing was enough, I had to wait for the firefighters,” said Boubakar, who started pulling people out of the burning bus.

“So I also pulled the others to safety: a woman, a man and a child. People were bleeding, there was so much blood.”

His flatmate, Odion Eboygbe, originally from Nigeria, helped him rescue tourists trapped in the twisted beasts of an electric bus, which the company that operates it says was brand new.

“We managed to save many, but unfortunately others died,” Odion said.

“I didn’t get scared, I didn’t think about my safety because I saw people with broken heads. Today, my colleagues asked me, ‘What were you thinking about when you were walking towards the flames,’ and I told them that all I had to do was save the women and children,” continues Odion.

Two young people say they have not slept since the accident that happened on the outskirts of Venice on Tuesday night.

When BBC journalists told Boubakar and Odion that people would call them heroes, the young Gambian modestly said: “If saving people makes you a hero, then maybe.”

“But when someone needs help through death, you can’t just walk away.”

The electric car fell from the pedestrian bridge

21 people were killed and 15 injured after a full bus fell from a pedestrian bridge over a railway and caught fire in Mestre, near Venice, on Tuesday night.

The bus was electric, used only for a year. It was occupied by foreign tourists returning from a one-day trip to Venice. While on the pedestrian bridge, he overcame the protective parapets and fell from a height of more than 10 meters over the railway, catching fire on impact.

The accident happened on Tuesday evening, shortly before 20:00 local time (21:00 Romanian), on a straight and usually very busy road that connects the Mestre district with the historic center of Venice.

Researchers’ hypotheses

Italian authorities are investigating the cause of the fall of an electric bus carrying foreign tourists on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

According to Ansa, the judicial authorities are examining two main hypotheses regarding the causes of the tragedy: a risky maneuver involving another bus and old handrails, or the illness of the driver of the car who failed to control the vehicle.

An electric bus broke a handrail and fell from a railway bridge in the Mestre district on Tuesday, falling more than 10 meters into the void.

“We assume that the driver was injured,” Veneto regional president Luca Zaia told Rtl 102.5 radio.

According to him, the testimony of eyewitnesses and recordings of video surveillance cameras can provide additional clues.

However, “the footage (of the accident), which also appeared in the national media, shows the need for a full investigation,” Di Bari said, adding that authorities were working to recover the car’s black box.

The bus was moving slowly before it fell off the bridge

People living nearby said they heard a loud bang and rushed to the scene to try to help.

“There was a woman who spoke English and cried. When I was taking her out, she said, “Take my daughter, take her,” Nigerian-born Godstim Erheneden told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“She was a small child, I think she was two years old. She was unconscious and I think she was dead. I’m very upset, she’s the same age as my son,” he added.

Checking the number plates showed that the bus was an electric vehicle of a Chinese manufacturer. Firefighters said Wednesday that the remains of the bus were still being examined because of a fire hazard from its batteries.

The head of the company that operated the bus, Massimo Fiorese, told Corriere della Sera that he had seen a video recording of the moments before the accident.

He said it showed the single-decker bus slowing down and appearing “almost stationary” when it hit the guardrail and fell.

“I think the driver was taken because I can’t explain it any other way,” Fiorese said, adding that the driver had started his shift less than two hours before the crash.

Images from the crash site showed that the crossing was equipped with old, relatively thin metal railings, rather than the newer, stronger concrete options.

“There are no signs of braking, no contact with other vehicles,” the head of the Vientiane prosecutor’s office said, according to ANSA.

Witnesses rule out that the broken bus was traveling fast.

The average age of the victims is very low. The list of the dead includes a child only one and a half years old – doctors could not determine the exact age – and a girl 11-12 years old. Two of the dead were 28 years old, another 30 years old.

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