"I simply could not sleep last night. Then today I went to work and I am a bit tired," said Aboubacar Touré the day after he saved the lives of two tourists caught in a fatal bus accident.

He was one of three African manual laborers who rushed into the wreckage and flames of a bus that had fallen from the Mestre overpass in northeastern Italy on Tuesday (October 3) evening, successfully saving some of the passengers.

Rushed to save who they could

Touré is from Gambia and has been in Italy for ten years. He previously worked in Ancona.

He lives with two Nigerian nationals in a large building at the bottom of the Mestre overpass and works at Idromacchine, a company working in the installation sector.

He and the other men who took part in the rescue are between the ages of 26 and 30.

"Yesterday I was cooking and we all heard a large noise, like an earthquake. Our Italian coworker Massimo opened a window and told us that a bus had fallen," he said.

"So then we went down and saw the bus, which had caught fire. There was a woman who wanted to get out but her daughter was inside. She did not speak Italian and instead said 'my daughter' in English. I grabbed her hand and pulled her out and then pulled her daughter out. I took the fire extinguisher to put out the fire but it was not enough. The carabinieri arrived and then the fire squad. We used a wire puller alongside them and we did what we could, pulling out people and even a dog," he added.

'I didn't think about death, I only wanted to save people'

Unfortunately the bus driver did not survive.

"I saw him but his head was bleeding, he was dead. Only afterwards did I feel any fear. When people called for help, I wasn't afraid. I had never seen anything like this, people dying with their clothes on fire," he added.

His coworker Odion Egboibe, a 26-year-old Nigerian, thanked the fire squad.

"They gave us new clothes, as they were bloodied. New shoes for my friend who lost them, too. But I did not think about death. I just wanted to save people," he said.