Newborn baby found in toilet pipe after student mum gives birth then flees

China: It is believed the baby's mother hoped to hide the pregnancy - but other students heard the infant's cries and alerted firemen

Police believe that the young woman had hoped to hide the pregnancy but because the toilet had no water filled U-bend, and because the pipe was only twenty centimetres wide, the baby girl's body had become wedged a short way down, where her cries alerted other students who then raised the alarm.

Firemen who rushed to the student dormitory in the city of Linyi in eastern China's Shandong Province were amazed to find the child wedged in the pipe and clearly still alive from the noise she was making, and realised it was a race against time to free her.

Fire Brigade spokesman Tao Fang said: "It was impossible to get the baby out from above.

"She had fallen into the toilet and gone down the pipes were she had got stuck between the third and fourth floors.

"We used an angle grinder to break open the pipeline on the third floor and we could then push the child up to colleagues on the fourth floor where she was handed to medics who were waiting to take her to hospital."