We are standing on the side of a flyover, looking over the edge, and it is a fearful sight.
Behind us, the traffic is pounding past, slowing slightly to take in the scene of northern Italy’s worst road accident.
And ahead of us is the reason why so many people perished here, just a couple of miles from the tourist streets and beautiful canals of Venice.
Image: Pic: AP
A gap – a nothingness where there should be something.
To be precise, there should be two lines of metal guardrails here, installed to stop a vehicle falling off the side in the case of an accident.
But instead, all you can see are remnants of a ghastly accident.
Fragments of toughened glass, the lingering smell of burning, and twisted, broken lengths of metal where the guardrail should be.
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Bus ‘violently’ veered
A little further down the hard shoulder, the guardrail is intact – and it is clearly old and corroded.
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It’s held in place by regular supports built into the surface; where the crash happened, those supports have either been sliced off, or have simply been ripped out.
What we know is that the bus veered violently to the right. What we don’t know is why.
CCTV footage shows the bus driving along, briefly passing out of sight behind another vehicle, and then appearing in shot as it falls from the side of the road.
Image: The driver is said to have been ‘experienced and respected’
But when I looked at the road surface, there was no sign of a skid mark; no indication that the driver had hit the brakes to try to slow the vehicle.
A piece of paper, taped to a lamppost, declares that the side of the road is now subject to criminal investigation, but the prosecutors remain wholly unsure what happened.
Did the driver, described as experienced and respected, suffer a catastrophic health problem, for instance?
Or was there a mechanical problem with the vehicle?
Just another grubby flyover
How could something have gone so extraordinarily wrong, here on a flyover that looks just like a thousand other grubby flyovers that we’ve all seen?
Standing here, it is a horrible sight, because you can see exactly what happened – the point where the bus careered off the road, smashed through the barriers and plunged around 50 feet to the road below, where it caught fire.
Image: Pic: AP
We drive down to that point. There is still an acrid smell in the air, and the road is discoloured.
Smashed glass litters the roadside and, yards from where the bus crashed down, you can see where people have been sleeping rough.
There is a concrete wall on the far side, dividing the road from the train station.
A ‘gruesome’ tale that leaves unanswered questions
The bus brushed against that wall on its way down, before smashing into the road, killing so many.
It is a gruesome tale, and, standing here now, with lorries already passing by regularly, it feels extraordinary that the traffic is already back using the flyover, and the road below it.
This is, after all, officially a crime scene and Venice is dealing with an extraordinary trauma.
A woman passes us by, carrying flowers that she leaves on the side of the road, adding to a small collection.
She is, she says, just an ordinary Venetian who wanted to pay her respects.
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Italy coach crash kills at least 21
“I am sad, upset,” she said, as another lorry pounds past, drowning out her sadness.
Some of the stories are unbearably sad.
A newborn baby killed. A couple from Croatia who had only been married for 20 days – the wife dead, the husband badly injured in hospital.
I meet Michele Di Bari, Venice’s chief of police.
He called the accident “a moment of great disturbance, of great pain and great suffering, because Venice is the city of the world.
“Tourists come here to admire the beauty and experience the serenity of a wonderful and extraordinary place.
Image: Pic: AP
“This is a great loss, a great tragedy, an unexpected, sudden event that shakes every human soul.
“When I arrived on the scene, I couldn’t help but be very upset, because there was an apocalyptic scene before my eyes, an enormous tragedy that the community will struggle to come to terms with.”
On the motorway, the traffic keeps moving, but Italy cannot escape the shadow of this crash, the spectre of tourists dying a horrendous death, and all the questions.
The country will fill in the gap next to the motorway, replace the barriers, repair the road.
But the questions will linger – how could this possibly have happened, and how can the nation be sure it won’t happen again?
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.
Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.
“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.
“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”
Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.
Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.
Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.
Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.
They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.
Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.
“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’
It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.
Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.
“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.
Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.
He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.
“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.