Woman hurt in balcony fall at mall

SHARJAH // A 50-year-old Ukrainian woman is recovering after an accidental fall from a second-floor balcony inside Sharjah Mega Mall on Sunday evening. A security guard who witnessed the incident said the woman had landed on her left side, apparently breaking her left leg and arm and injuring her head. "We all believed she had died; blood was everywhere, and police immediately cordoned off the area and took her to hospital," he said.

According to Sharjah Police, the woman was at the mall in the company of a colleague to shop before her return to Ukraine next week. "She was scheduled to leave the country on Monday," the colleague, also a Ukrainian woman, told police in a statement. The police declined to name the company where the woman worked or to say what kind of work she was doing. "All we can tell you is that our investigations have established it was not a suicide bid," a senior police officer said.

Police said, however, that the woman had been behaving erratically before falling, and that they had established that she had been on medication for psychological problems. Sources from the Kuwaiti Hospital said the woman was in a stable condition but was likely to stay in hospital for a few more days. This is the second serious fall in less than a week in Sharjah. An Indian national fell to his death from a fourth-floor apartment opposite Sharjah City Centre.

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