A dog foraging for food for her newborn puppies has reportedly rescued an abandoned baby girl from a forest in Kenya. Witnesses said the dog apparently found the two-week-old infant in a forest south of the capital Nairobi. It then carried the baby, wrapped in a dirty, black cloth, across a busy road and through a barbed-wire fence and placed it close to the puppies.

"I heard the sound of a baby crying, (when) I looked closely, I saw a dog carrying a baby.. as it crossed the road," Stephen Thoya told the Daily Nation newspaper. The dog lay next to the baby until it was spotted by human rescuers, its owner Mary Adhiambo said. Ms Adhiambo said she washed the baby - whose umbilical chord was covered with maggots - and rushed it to hospital.

At the hospital, where the 3.3kg child was christened Angel, doctors confirmed the infant had been out in the open for two days. "An infant of such a tender age, having spent two nights in the cold, is likely to develop respiratory infections and we have put her on a.. treatment to prevent any bacterial or fungal infections," Dr Jonathan Micheni told the paper.