A 17-month child plunged 4.5 metres from the 1st-floor of the Motril Town Hall on Monday the 19th. The baby girl, who survived the fall, is in the Intensive Care Unit.

The Romanian mother, Mariana, who had gone to the Town Hall to put her children’s names down on the municipal roll, was obviously in a state of shock. She needed the paperwork so that her 12 and 10-year-old daughters could transfer from the school near the port to one near the centre of Motril.

“I’ve always got her in my arms – I never let her out of my sight,” she explained, adding that she is still breast-feeding the child. But in a moment’s distraction, the child slipped through the bannisters around the inside patio of the building.

Even though a woman had warned her that the child could squeeze through the bars and to be careful, she misjudged the danger, believing that the bars were too close together. The accident occurred in the fraction of a moment that it took her to look for her telephone to call her ex-husband to explain how problematic the paperwork was turning out to be. She looked up just in time to see her daughter disappearing from sight.

She ran down the staircase, falling herself, but was up in a moment to reach her daughter, who was unconscious. Fortunately, two municipal policeman and a doctor were to hand. When they turned the child over, she began to cry, which was a relief. The Ambulance soon arrived and took the child to Santa Ana in Motril, before transferring her to the Maternity Hospital in Granada City.

Fortunately, the child had only suffered two fractures and two small cuts to the head.

(News: Motril, Costa Tropical, Grandada, Andalucia)