HUNG 500ft UP

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29909, 24 August 1962, Page 11

HUNG 500ft UP

Man Drops But

Lives

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, August 23.

A young man hung 500 ft above pavements from the end of a crane jib on a hotel roof in fashionable Park Lane, in the heart of London’s West End, early today while the crowd below screamed. He dangled in space for nearly an hour, fell and lived when he landed on the roof of the skyscraper hotel’s 30th storey.

He injured a leg, fractured an ankle and suffered cuts, bruises and torn ligaments in his fall, and was taken to hospital.

It took police and firemen three-quarters of an hour to carry him on a stretcher down the stairs of the partlycompleted new building, the London Hilton Hotel. The drama began when a police patrol car followed two men on a motor-scooter. The pillion pasenger was questioned and arrested by the police, but the rider ran away. Later a man was seen climbing the scaffolding ladder on the south side of the hotel. A crowd of 150 persons gathered as the figure climbed upwards, from the roof of the hotel to the crane. While on the crane he discarded his shirt and jacket.