A man who hopped on to a school bus full of terrified children that was careering down a Minnesota street after its driver had a medical emergency and manually halted it says he was motivated to act by a Qu’ran verse about how saving one life is equivalent to saving all of humanity.

“I’m a numbers guy, and those numbers make sense to me,” Ebro Ahmed, 27, said on Friday during an interview about his actions four days earlier in front of his family’s convenience store in Saint Paul, Minnesota . “I didn’t do it for me. It was selflessness in the name of God.”

In a dramatic sequence of events captured on surveillance video by the shop, Ahmed was kicking a soccer ball and scrolling on his cellphone during a break outside his family’s Ya Bricks Snacks and Tobacco store on Monday afternoon when he noticed a yellow school bus passing by with its door flung open.

Ahmed said he deduced something was wrong when he saw the bus driver with foam coming out of his mouth, which can be a symptom of a seizure.…