Car thief drives off with baby

Drama: North Middlesex hospital, where the car, and the baby, were taken from

A thief stole a car from a hospital today - and drove off with a five-week old baby girl in the back.

Kaleisha Callender was taken while her father Kashka left her for a few moments in the car park of a north London hospital.

She was found unharmed more than an hour later in the front garden of a house in Tottenham.

Mr Callender was buying a car parking ticket when he heard his BMW starting and dashed back to see a thief making off with the car with his daughter still strapped into her seat in the back.

Police mounted a massive operation and traced the convertible, which was discovered crashed less then a mile away.

The thief appears to have grabbed the baby out of the car and dumped her unharmed in the garden where she was discovered by a home owner.

The drama started shortly before 9.30am when Mr Callender went to the North Middlesex Hospital to visit his wife Natasha, 27, in the hospital's accident and emergency department.

About an hour after Kaleisha was kidnapped, police found the blue BMW crashed into a lamp-post in nearby Dysons Road, Edmonton.

At this stage there was no trace of Kaleisha. Then, some distance from the crashed car it is believed a householder found a dumped baby and handed her to the police. The baby was later confirmed to be Kaleisha. She had not been harmed.

Both parents were said to be "highly emotional" and were later reunited with their daughter, police sources said.

Detectives were today hunting the thief, who is thought to have tried to steal the car but crashed it when they realised the baby was in the back seat.

Police said Kaleisha had been left in the garden of a house at least a mile from where the BMW car had been found crashed.

Police appealed for anyone who saw the blue BMW, registration number FG52 OLJ, being stolen.

The car had a dent in its offside wing, baby clothing in the back seat and a red, black and white Trinidadian flag in the back. Kaleisha was in a white all-in-one baby suit.

A Scotland Yard smpokeswoman said: "We are appealing to anyone who saw this person drive off in the car with Kaleisha in the back."

She added that a 27-year-old man had been arrested in connection with the incident.

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