A grandfather who allegedly dropped his granddaughter from the eleventh deck of a cruise ship has been accused of negligent homicide.

Chloe Wiegand, who was 18 months old, had asked her granddad to lift her up so she could bang on the glass in a children’s play area, lawyers for the family said.

But her granddad Salvatore Annello did not realise the window was open and the girl fell onto the concrete dock below when he raised her up, it is claimed.

A judge ordered his arrest yesterday after prosecutors submitted evidence.

Anello says it was a tragic accident, and blames the cruise ship company for leaving the window open.

The family is from Indiana and was on board Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas, docked in Puerto Rico in July.

Anello is being held on an 80,000 US dollars (£62,000) bond and is scheduled to appear in court on November 20.

An eyewitness to the horrific tragedy told Telemundo PR how they’d heard her mother scream afterwards.

They said: ‘I looked because of the mother’s cry. ‘That tonality, a scream of pain of that nature, does not compare with any other scream.’

The family blame Royal Caribbean for Chloe’s death, and say that the sliding window feature was extremely dangerous.

Kimberly said: ‘We have a lot of questions, primarily, why is there an open window in the kids play area 11 stories off the ground?’

‘We obviously blame them. There are a million things that could have been done to make that safer.

‘I know my mom was asking why on Earth was there a window open on the 11th floor without a screen or anything?

‘Their response to that was “We need ventilation”.

‘To that I would say, get a fan, come up with some other mechanism to keep your guests comfortable rather than creating a tremendous safety hazard that cost our child her life.’#

Royal Caribbean said after the accident that they were ‘deeply saddened’ by it.

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