12-yr-old survives fall from 14 floors

New York, Aug. 3: A 12-year-old girl who fell into a chimney on her Manhattan rooftop and plummeted down the flue for 14 floors survived almost unscathed when she landed in a pile of soot.

Grace Bergere was recovering at a New York hospital on Sunday with an injured hip.

A two-foot-deep pile of ash and dust in the basement furnace cushioned her fall and may have saved her life, fire officials said.

Rescuers did not expect to find the girl alive, but spotted her soot-caked hand reaching out for help.

After emerging, she was completely covered in black, with only her eyes and mouth visible.

Fire chief Austin Horan said Grace emerged "relatively unscathed’’ from the accident on Thursday night at the Westbeth Artists Housing complex where the girl lives with her father. The rooftop adventure began on Saturday when Grace Bergere was showing her cousin the view of the city from the top of the family’s apartment building.

—AP

***

Top Syrian general is assassinated

Beirut, Aug. 3: Arab media reported on Sunday that a brigadier general thought to be the Syrian regime’s liaison with Hezbollah in Lebanon has been assassinated.

The reports came almost six months after the killing in a Damascus car-bomb of top Hezbollah military commander Ima Mughnieh, which the Shia militant group blamed on Israel.

The Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat on Sunday quoted "informed sources" in London as saying that a senior Syrian officer had been found dead.

"The circumstances of the incident are not clear," the London-based paper said in its report which said the sources suggested that the slain officer had been "in charge of sensitive files and closely linked to the Syrian top brass." Al-Bawaba, an Arab news website, named the officer as Mohammed Sleiman and said he was "Syria’s liaison officer with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement." It said he was killed by a sniper in the northwest Syrian town of Tartus and would be buried in his hometown on Sunday. —AFP