A three-year-old who died for six minutes after suffering a cardiac arrest has thanked medics who brought him back to life.

Kai Clark suffered the attack at his home in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, on October 17. He stopped breathing and his heart stopped beating. His mother, Kelly Clark, who was looking after Kai, said she feared for the worst until paramedics and the air ambulance arrived.

Without the expertise and team work between the medical crews and the rapid transfer to a specialist hospital, doctors said Kai would almost certainly not have survived. Kai was later transferred to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital – but was home for Christmas.

Yesterday, the family visited Cambridge Airport, where the East Anglian Air Ambulance is based, to say thank you to the helicopter crews and the East of England Ambulance Trust.

Fishing boat lost and found

An Italian fisherman has recovered his boat after it escaped from its moorings and drifted 700 kilometres to the coast of southern France.

The Dany, a 4.6-metre fishing boat, went missing in bad weather in October from Vernazza in north-western Italy. It was recovered, intact despite its long journey, by a trawler near Port la Nouvelle on the French Mediterranean coast in November.

“We identified the owner, called him, and he told us he was very attached to this family boat and would come and get it,” a coast guard said.

The owner, 67-year-old Rollando Giovanni, offered to reward the captain of the trawler but the captain refused.

Caviar ‘in morgue freezer’

Police have discovered a huge stash of contraband caviar stored in a hospital morgue freezer alongside dead bodies in Russia’s second city of Saint Petersburg, officials said yesterday.

Kept in large canisters marked “Aviation Security. Inspected,” the stash of both red and black caviar weighed 175 kilos – a haul that can cost hundreds of thousands of euros on the open market.

“The caviar was being stored in the morgue freezer, which relatives used to say their final goodbye to the departed,” a police spokesman in Saint Petersburg said by telephone.

The Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said the morgue appeared to have been partially leased to a local businessman who used it as a transport and packaging centre for the caviar.

Thieves’ change of heart

A bag of presents stolen from a Father Christmas in Rome has been returned with an apologetic note from the thieves after the victim made an impassioned appeal, Il Messaggero daily reported yesterday.

“We’re sorry. We made a mistake. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!” read the scrawled note left by the bag with €1,000 worth of presents that were stolen on Christmas Eve but were found still in their wrapping. The gifts were taken at a Christmas market on Piazza Navona in the city centre where local businessman Giorgio Abbruzzese – dressed in a paunchy red costume and flowing white beard – has been a feature for years.

“We discovered that even thieves have a heart,” said 51-year-old Abbruzzese, who is planning to make a special appearance at the market this month to hand out the returned gifts to children.

Drink driver does it again

A man drove to a German police station to ask to get back his licence which he had lost for drink driving but was immediately arrested for a blood-alcohol level far above the legal limit.

The 47-year-old rolled up in his car to the police headquarters in Plauen on Tuesday, and asked where his driving licence was, as it had been confiscated days before due to drink driving.

Noticing he was again intoxicated, police officers ordered a test which revealed ablood-alcohol level of nearly six times the limit of 50 millilitres.