After the incident, all the buses leaving from Deodoro were escorted by the military.
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Correa doesn’t know yet whether the stones were thrown “by hand or by any other instrument” but he says it was an “act of vandalism not a criminal act with the intention of injuring one person or another”. Police searched the bus and said it was stones, not bullets, to break the window.
Reuters reporter Shannon Stapleton, who has experience reporting from conflict zones, said it had sounded like shots.
Lee Michaelson, a reporter on women’s basketball who is also a retired US Air Force captain, had claimed after the attack that the damage had been caused by bullets.
“I will not believe that was stone-throwing unless I see a forensics and a ballistics report looking not at the steel surround. but at the glass, which was the point of impact”, Michaelson told reporters after the news conference.
“Immediately, he looked in the rear view mirror and noticed that the passengers were lying on the ground”.
“At this time, he realized that two windows on the same side of the bus were broken”, the committee said in a statement. He resumed the route under the escort of the police vehicle and the broken windows began to give way further.
Reports claimed that the bus was either fired upon or hit by rocks, resulting in two windows being smashed.
A dozen journalists on the bus suffered minor injuries.
On Saturday a bullet landed at the feet of photographers at Rio’s equestrian venue, with security forces concluding that the missile was sacked at a police blimp from a local community.
The bus was carrying journalists returning from the Deodoro Olympic district to the main press centre at Barra da Tijuca. That bullet was suspected to have been fired by a gang member trying to shoot down a police blimp or drone, officials said.
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Concern has mounted over a series of robberies during the Rio Games.
