Python bites, drags 5-year-old Australian boy into pool

Dramatic rescue

A five-year-old boy has survived being bitten, constricted and knocked into a swimming pool by a python the length of a small car, with his father telling media, "Aw look, it's where we live. It is Australia." Five-year-old Beau was playing by the edge of a pool in Byron Bay when a three-metre-long python struck from nearby vegetation, his father Ben Blake told Nine radio on Friday. "I believe the python was sort of sitting there waiting for a victim to come along — a bird or something — and Beau was it." The python bit the child, plunged both into the water and coiled itself around a leg. The boy's 76-year-old grandfather lept to the rescue, diving into the pool and lifting the boy out — with snake still attached. Ben Blake then prised the snake loose. "I'm not a little lad, I had him released within 15-20 seconds," he told the radio station.