This is the moment when two lives hung in the balance at a high-rise building as a mother dangled her baby son from the window hundreds of feet above the ground.
The woman was seen crying, shouting and threatening to throw herself off the 12th floor of a block of flats in Shanghai, China.
After disappearing briefly back inside the apartment she reappeared at the window with her small child and threatened to hurl him to his death before she jumped.
‘Don’t anyone try to stop me!’ she screamed. ‘I am serious. I will kill him then myself.’
A large force of police, firemen and medics was scrambled to the building and staged a dramatic rescue operation.
One firefighter risked his own life by being lowered from a window above where the woman and child were in an attempt to prevent the pair falling to their deaths.
A police spokesman said: ‘It was a very delicate situation. We didn’t know if she would hurl the child to its death and then kill herself as she was threatening.
‘We summoned a mental health specialist to talk to the woman, to try to calm her down. While this was going on, fire personnel looked for a way to access her apartment without her knowing.’
In the tense stand-off on Wednesday the firemen managed to gently break in through another window into the woman’s apartment and sneak up on her as she was talking with negotiators.
The police spokesman added: ‘It was fortunate that they were able to seize her and the child at the same time. The situation ended peacefully.’
The woman has been taken to a psychiatric hospital while the child is with foster parents.
It is unclear when she will be reunited with her child
According to media reports, the woman was depressed about being jobless and ‘stuck at home’ all day.
