Sick French baby's life in danger

A father has kidnapped his two-month-old boy from a hospital in France where he was undergoing emergency treatment, prosecutors said Saturday, warning that the baby's life was in danger.

Baby Tizio, who was being fed with gastric and intravenous tubes, was snatched on Friday evening from a children's hospital in the southern city of Toulouse, triggering an abduction alert.

"His life is at risk if he does not receive medical care immediately," Toulouse prosecutors said in a statement.The 33-year-old unemployed father was separated from the boy's mother but they appeared to have been on cordial terms and he visited the baby in hospital every day.

A source close to the case said Tizio's kidnapping was "incomprehensible".

The baby was last seen with his father at around 6 pm on Friday but the alert was not raised until 1 am, the source said.

The father was described as tall and slender with a full beard and long black-brown curly hair.

A hospital official said: "The only thing that matters for us is to find the baby really fast."

The "abduction alert" in France was inspired by the the Amber Alert child abduction system set up in the United States in 1996 after the kidnap and murder of a nine-year-old girl in Texas.

The French system has been used more than 20 times since it was established in 2006, and all the children were found safe and sound, all but two of them very quickly.