SPAIN:Spanish police were yesterday continuing the search for a British woman who disappeared after her seven-year-old daughter was severely injured in a fall from a fifth-floor hotel balcony in Mallorca.
It remains unclear how Gianna Cooper, from Foxton in Cambridgeshire, came to fall from the balcony of the Samoa hotel in Calas de Mallorca on Monday morning, and why her mother, Sara, subsequently went missing from the resort. But a British holidaymaker, the first person to see Gianna after she fell, yesterday said that one of the girl's brothers, who was in the room next door when she fell, said that their mother had told them "she was going to run away".
Kevin Frieze (49), who is staying on the fourth floor of the hotel, said he was woken by a child crying shortly after 7am on Monday. He looked over his balcony to see a girl sitting on the flat roof of the restaurant below. "At first I thought she had just walked out there from a floor below and called out to see if she was all right. But then I realised something serious had happened, it was a very distressed, painful crying, mixed with mumbling and I saw blood on her face and chest. I thought then that she must have fallen." Mr Frieze woke his wife, Jackie, and they raised the alarm. "Some cleaners forced open a window on the first floor and climbed out to her," he said. "Some minutes later, the girl's father joined them on the roof and we sat with his two sons while he tended to his daughter." Mr Frieze said that the girl was conscious the entire time, but kept repeating that she "wanted her mummy".
"The boys seemed half-asleep and the father was extraordinarily calm. At one point he called to his sons, 'Where is your mother?' and the younger boy answered, 'She said she was going to run away'." The family was on a half-term break, and Ms Cooper was staying with her daughter in one room, while her husband, Martin (44), and two of their three sons were in the room next door.
Gianna was yesterday recovering in hospital in Palma de Mallorca, where a spokesman described her condition as "serious but stable". She suffered head injuries, a broken jaw, and damaged her lungs, liver and gall bladder in the fall.