A Reuters photographer, who has experience in battlefield, said he also had the impression that the bus was hit by gunfire.
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While authorities said it was not immediately clear what struck the bus, a retired U.S. Air Force captain who now writes about women’s basketball said she was certain it was gunfire.
A passenger said an Olympic media bus was hit by bullets on Tuesday night, shattering two windows as the bus returned from the women’s basketball venue in Deodoro.
Some reporters on the bus, which was traveling from Deodoro to the Olympic Park, reported hearing two gunshots.
“We were on the highway going fast and we hear a loud noise and we just got shot at, two windows and we could see the bullet”.
According to Michaelson, a police officer boarded the bus after it stopped a couple of kilometers further up the road and examined the windows before the vehicle proceeded on to the Olympic Park without further incident.
The bus was carrying a variety of local and worldwide journalists from the basketball venue to the heart of the Olympic complex Friday night when it was struck, a glass window shattering and the flying debris injuring two passengers.
A spokesman for the Rio organizing committee, Mario Andrada, said forensic investigators were trying to determine if the projectile was a bullet or a rock. There was a very distinctive sound of the report of a gun. “I mean we could hear the report of the gun”, Sherryl “Lee” Michaelson, a retired USA air force captain who is on assignment for a basketball publication, told Reuters.
“That is when the driver pulled over and talked to a policeman”.
Rio’s violent street crime had already left its mark on South America’s first Olympic Games.
When he checked his rear view mirror, he found the journalists were lying on the ground. He saw a police vehicle and stopped. At this time, he realised that two windows on the same side of the bus were broken. Preliminary results will be released as they become available.
Olympic officials have heightened the Brazilian military presence in the area.
The incident on Tuesday is the latest of several to blight the Games.
“According to the security forces, the bullet came from a community far from here”. “They were aiming at the blimp which carries cameras”.
“The same source, from the ministry of defence, says the first findings showed that the bullet arrived with low energy and low speed”.
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Andrada said three of the 12 journalists on the bus suffered minor injuries.
