05 July 2007

Boy bogged down

How many members of the emergency services does it take to pull a young boy out of the toilet? Twenty, if the case of a nine-year-old UAE national is anything to go by. In a scene more familiar to ‘The Towering Inferno’, two police patrols, containing four policemen, two vehicles containing four officers from the Difficult Missions Squad, two policemen from the Land Rescue Department, an ambulance - containing three medics - and a civil defence truck containing seven officers, all turned up to rescue the young lad after receiving a call from his family.
Police said the boy told them his foot had slipped into the Arabic-style toilet and become stuck. After several unsuccessful attempts to pull himself free, he called for help from his family, but unfortunately they were unable to help and so called the police. Police patrols and the head of Land Rescue Department, Expert Captain Ahmad Ateeq, went to the villa and were soon joined by the Civil Defence.“We send people with good experience for these kind of problems. We wanted to free his foot without harming him,” a Civil Defence official said. In the meantime, police phoned the Difficult Missions Squad to lend their expertise. “We received the call and immediately went to the house in Al Barsha. The boy’s foot was stuck inside the toilet hole and he didn’t know what to do,” First Lieutenant Mohammad Al-Reyasa, head of Difficult Missions Squad, told 7DAYS. “When we first arrived, he was very scared but we spoke to him and calmed him down while we did our job.”When asked why it took so many people to free the boy, who was left trapped for several hours, Al-Reyasa said: “It’s just an automatic response in such emergencies. Because the police and the Civil Defence could not release him we were called. They had tried to pull him free but that didn’t work so we smashed the toilet - but very carefully so we did not injure him,” Al-Reyasa added.The boy was treated at Rashid Hospital for minor injuries before being sent home. Source

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