Miracle Baby! Survives fall from 7th-floor Paris flat

A 15-month-old girl survived a fall from a seventh-floor apartment in Paris almost unscathed after bouncing off a cafe awning and into the arms of a passerby, police said today.

The baby had been playing unsupervised with her four-year-old sister yesterday when she fell out of the window, a police spokesman said.

A young man saw the baby starting to fall and alerted his father, who raced into position, arms outstretched, to catch her after she hit the awning, the daily Le Parisien reported.

"He must have played rugby for years to have developed reflexes like that," a bystander who saw the incident told the paper. Police said the girl appeared to have no serious injuries and was under observation in a nearby hospital.

The owner of the cafe, located at the foot of the block of flats in north-east Paris, said it was a stroke of luck he had decided to leave the awning open that afternoon. "I usually close it to stop it catching fire as people tend to throw their cigarette butts on to it."

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