Bus Hijack By Albanians in Northern Italy Sparks Terror Scare

Text of report by Italian newspaper La Stampa website on 16 May

[Report by Fabio Poletti: "Hostages of Madness on Commuter Bus"]

Trecate – They were very young, fair-haired, with clean faces. When they got on at the bus stop at Cassine, between Acqui Terme and Alessandria, few people noticed the three Albanians who, without saying a word, sat in the back row. Not Andrea Patrone, who has been a bus-driver for 10 years with the Arfea bus company, a life spent going up and down the main road which skirts the river Bormida. Nor Roberto Curelli, a police officer, who was the first to react, and the first to be injured, in this madcap story of three crazies without a known past. Not the 10 passengers – students, women, and office workers – who were ultimately hostages for almost two hours, until they got to this side street where the wreck of the bus is still smoking, between the railroad station, the Ticino, and the nothingness of the fields, underneath the bridge of San Martino di Trecate, 100 kilometres further north.

The very young, fair-haired men with clean faces, and no criminal record, who perhaps only wanted to rob the passengers, were perhaps dreaming of an improbable mass abduction, and they certainly found their way into a story which was bigger than them. “We’re going to Milan…,” shouted one of them, the only one with a gun, when the bus had gone 100 meters. The driver didn’t want to believe that there was anyone so crazy as to think of hijacking a bus operating a scheduled service. Officer Roberto Curelli, who happened to be one of the passengers, and whose profession made him a would-be hero, did not have time to pull out his gun before he was stabbed in the arm. Another officer, Egidio Valentino, who also happened to be a passenger, was thrown out of a window after being punched in the face. One of the three Albanians fired a shot in the air, but perhaps it was a blank. A woman made a call on her mobile phone, and had time to tell a relative: “There are some madmen aboard the bus. They’re obviously on drugs…”.

Holding up the stage-coach

It looked like the start of “United 93,” the Al-Qa’idah hijackers, and instead it was only a clumsy attack on a stage- coach. It took hours to realize this. The anti-terrorism departments in Turin and Milan were in a state of high excitement. In order to threaten the passengers, the three Albanians made the bus stop at a gas station in the Voltri-Gravellona area. They drew the curtains of the windows. They filled the tank. They filled two jerry cans with gasoline, the soft plastic ones for motorists whose cars have broken down. Then they began to collect mobile phones, wallets, watches, rings, and necklaces. “They told us not to look at their faces, to keep looking down at the floor…,” recounted one passenger, a woman who was returning home, and who instead ended up in this new version of “Stagecoach” by John Ford, with the part of the Indians being played by Albanians, and the Ticino park standing in for Monument Valley. It looked like a film, but the fear was real. As were the police and Carabinieri helicopters which, from above, began to follow the bus, which was racing towards who knew where, and which left the highway at Vercelli Est, with the police and Carabinieri cars following with their sirens wailing, but which did not intervene immediately. “The motives of the hijacking are incomprehensible at present,” admitted Turin magistrates, while it was still not over.

At Trecate there was a road-block. By the sides of the main road which leads to Milan there were police and Carabinieri. “Only one of them has a gun,” the officer who was released first had already recounted in hospital. Perhaps it was just a case of hotheads. When the bus passed, the first shots were heard. The bus went down a side road which ended at a barrier bordering a field where there was a railroad cabin. The three Albanians made the passengers get down, they poured the contents of the jerry cans on the seats, and set them alight. It was a desperate attempt to create a diversion. “We heard some explosions, and perhaps shots as well. Then we saw flames rising up. We saw a young man running wearing a blood-stained white T-shirt…,” recounted some passers-by who were pedalling along the Ticino where now, around what remains of the bus, there are the analysts from the forensic department.

The blood-stained T-shirt

The young man with the blood-stained T-shirt is called Muka Ali, he is 27, and he came from Albania eight years ago. Another, wearing a black T-shirt, ran towards the railroad tracks, and lost a shoe. The dogs from the police dog-handling unit found him two hours later, hidden in a bush. His name is Armand Ali Ibrahimi, and he is 19. Some passengers say that, at one point, he wanted to surrender, and that the leader, the third Albanian whom they are looking for, the man with the handgun and the most dangerous one, threw the jerry can at him. He too ended up on the injured list, which begins with six passengers. The most serious is the police officer who reacted first, and who was stabbed in the arm. The bone is exposed, and at the hospital in Novara they are saying that it is not serious. The other four passengers who stayed on the bus until the last moment, and who suffered no injury, ended up at the Carabinieri barracks in Trecate. In statements placed on record, they reconstructed, moment by moment, these two hours as hostages on the roads of Piedmont.

“They seemed to be high on drugs, and we did not even understand what they wanted from us. They spoke Italian, but it was clear that they were foreigners,” they told the Carabinieri, while still in shock. “The two Albanians will be given tests because, apparently, they were under the influence of drugs,” said Maurizio Laudi, the head of the DDA [District Anti-Mafia Directorate] in Turin. “It was not just a hold-up, perhaps they also wanted to demand a ransom to release the hostages,” the magistrate went on to suggest, after an afternoon which ended up in a field, with the police and Carabinieri helicopters finally on the ground, and patrols in the woods looking for the third man, the Albanian with the gun who dreamt of pulling off the big one, as he had seen in who knows what film.

(c) 2007 BBC Monitoring European. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.