A woman threw herself from a restaurant on the 23rd-floor of a Buenos Aires hotel, only to miraculously survive when her fall was broken by a parked taxi.


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The woman fell nearly 100 meters (330 feet) from the restaurant at the top of the the Panamericano hotel Photo: AP



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The woman was rushed to the nearby Hospital Argerich, where she was being operated on for injuries including internal bleeding and broken hips and ribs Photo: AP



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The Panamericano hotel, Buenos Aires Photo: AP



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The woman landed in a sitting position on the roof of a taxi, deeply denting the roof and shattering the windshield Photo: AP

6:45AM GMT 25 Jan 2011 Comment


Photographs showed the 30-year-old woman bent into the buckled roof of the black-and-yellow taxi before she was rushed to hospital, where she had a lung, a kidney and her spleen removed, according to officials.

Witnesses in the restaurant atop the Panamericano hotel, described how she had calmly ordered a coffee and left her purse behind before taking off her shoes to climb over a safety barrier and jumping.

"If I had not got out, she would have killed me," the shocked taxi driver, Miguel Cajal, told local media. "I felt this explosion and I saw this woman's body sunken into the roof of my cab.

"The first thing I did was call my family. And then I just started to cry; it is really hard to see something like that."

Mr Cajal told the C5N television station that he jumped out of the car because he saw a policeman stopping traffic and looking up. Moments later, the driver's side of the car was smashed by the woman's body.

The woman landed in a sitting position on the roof of a taxi, deeply denting the roof and shattering the windshield.
She was rushed to the nearby Hospital Argerich, where she was being operated on for injuries including internal bleeding and broken hips and ribs, Alberto Crescenti, director of Argentina's Emergency Medical System, told the government news agency Telam. He estimated that she fell nearly 100 meters (330 feet).



Taxi saves woman who jumped from 23rd storey of hotel - Telegraph