Global News

[ad_1] Flags flew at half-mast over Venice on Wednesday 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 10 metres (32 feet)” landing next to railway tracks below, said Mauro Luongo, Venice’s fire brigade commander. The dead are thought to be mostly tourists returned from Venice’s historic centre to a camping site on Tuesday evening. Fifteen others 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 in the early hours of Wednesday. “Among the difficulties was the fact that the bus was electric so it had batteries. Unfortunately, they caught fire on impact,” said Luongo. “That’s why operatio