Woman catches toddler after 10-storey fall

A 2-year-old Chinese girl left unattended fell 10 storeys from her family's apartment window and survived after being caught by a woman passing by, state media reported.

The toddler was in critical condition with internal bleeding and other unspecified injuries, while the woman who saved her broke an arm, China Central Television and the Xinhua News Agency said.

The girl, named Zhang Fangyu but known by the nickname Niu Niu, was in the care of her grandmother on Saturday afternoon (local time) when the older woman left the 10th-floor apartment outside the eastern city of Hangzhou to run an errand, CCTV said.

Neighbors saw Niu Niu dangling from the apartment window for several minutes, Xinhua said, and when the girl fell, Wu Juping "kicked off her high-heeled shoes" and ran to catch the child.

"It was so urgent. I saw her when she was about to fall and rushed there, and after tens of seconds she fell off," CCTV quoted Wu as saying.

A 31-year-old mother, Wu told CCTV that when she saw the hanging girl she thought of her own seven-month-old son who had once fallen from a high chair and cut his mouth: "I thought to myself 'I should stretch my arms to her. Because I am right here, I must get her.' Then I made it. I caught her in my arms."

The impact knocked Wu out and sent her crumbling to the ground along with breaking her left arm, the reports said.

CCTV quoted an unidentified doctor at the Children's Hospital of Zhejiang Hospital as saying that a scan showed no damage to Niu Niu's brain but that the girl's abdomen was swollen in a sign of possible injury to organs.