[ad_1]
TAIPEI: A three-year-old girl in Taiwan was reported to be safe after being caught in the strings of a kite and lifted several meters into the air.
The unidentified girl was participating in a kite festival on Sunday (August 30) in the coastal city of Nanliao when she was struck by a giant long-tailed orange kite.
Video recorded at the scene showed her spinning several times over a crowd of adults for about half a minute before returning to earth in outstretched hands.
News reports said the girl was scared but was not physically injured in the incident.
Hsinchu Mayor Lin Chih-chien said the girl suffered some scratches on her face and was terrified of the ordeal, but otherwise unharmed.
“The city government expresses its deepest apologies to the girl and the public,” he said on Facebook.
Footage of the incident quickly went viral.
“Everyone at the scene was almost scared to death. It really happened in the blink of an eye,” wrote a blogger, who goes by the name of Via, in a Facebook post with a video of the accident that took more than 1.61 million visits.
A 34-year-old man, identified by his last name Lin, told Apple Daily that he helped the girl land again when the kite’s tail lowered low enough.
“At first I thought it was some kind of stunt show … then I thought we couldn’t drop the kid,” he said.
The Hsinchu authorities stopped the kite festival after the incident.
