A young man has been hailed a hero after he scaled the facade of a building to save a four-year-old child hanging from a fourth-floor balcony.
Without a thought for his own safety, Mamoudou Gassama took just seconds to reach the child in a spectacular rescue captured on film.
The incident took place at about 8pm on Saturday , 26 May, in northern Paris.
Footage of the rescue shows Gassama, 22, pulling himself up from balcony to balcony with his bare hands as a man on the fourth floor tries to hold on to the child by leaning across from a neighbouring balcony.
On reaching the fourth floor, Gassama puts one leg over the balcony before reaching out with his right arm and grabbing the child.
Firefighters arrived at the scene to find the child had already been rescued.
“Luckily, there was someone who was physically fit and who had the courage to go and get the child,” a fire service spokesman said.
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, praised him on Twitter for his “act of bravery” as well as phoning him personally to “thank him warmly”.
According to initial inquiries by French police, the child’s parents were not at home at the time. The father was later held for questioning by Paris police for having left his child unattended and was due in court later.
The child’s mother was not in Paris at the time of the incident.
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