For a married couple from Naples, a vacation in Munich ends in a nightmare: their seven-year-old daughter is playing in the hotel garden when a marble statue buries her. The police are investigating how the accident could have happened.
A seven-year-old girl was killed by a falling stone statue in the inner courtyard of a Munich hotel. As the police in the Bavarian capital announced, the child from Italy, who was on vacation with his parents, was in the courtyard in the Isarvorstadt district on Friday evening when the statue, which weighed around 200 kilograms, fell over.
A scream made several people aware of the accident, freed the seriously injured girl and made an emergency call. Rescue workers took the seven-year-old to a hospital under ongoing resuscitation, where she later died. The cause of the accident was initially unclear. The criminal police initiated an investigation.
According to a report in the Corriere della Sera newspaper, the marble statue in the hotel’s garden was not fixed to the ground. Because of the great weight, no danger was seen in it, the paper wrote. The police are currently holding talks with the hotel management, the report continues.
The mother, a well-known lawyer from the Naples area, posted the news of her daughter’s death herself on Facebook. “You are and will remain our angel, rest in peace, love of our lives,” she wrote there. The father, also a well-known lawyer, is said to have witnessed the accident. He was reportedly the first to see his seriously injured daughter. “Our lives have changed,” he told a colleague, according to media reports. There was great sympathy in Italy, and the mayor of the island of Ponza, where the family lives, also expressed his condolences on social media.
The girl’s parents will initially stay in Munich to clarify formalities. The body of the little one is still being examined. Only after the completion of the autopsy should he be transferred to Naples, Italian media reported.
