A 12-year-old girl miraculously survived being hit by a half-kg cement block that had a 4-cm rusted iron nail that pierced her skull in Nalasopara East on Sunday morning. Chandani Pandey, a Std VI student, a resident of Nagindas Pada, was on her way to buy chocolate, and was walking past an under-construction site. An eyewitness told mid-day that a small cement block that had the rusted iron nail embedded in it suddenly fell on her head and got stuck.

Even though bleeding profusely, the girl, surprisingly, did not faint and rode pillion on the motorbike of the eyewitness, Satyadev Kumar, to the hospital. "I was passing by the area around 10.30 am when I saw what happened to the girl. I immediately took her to a hospital," Kumar told mid-day.