A five-year-old boy is seriously ill in hospital after a ‘stranger’ hurled him from the third floor of a mall in front of his screaming mother.

The horrific incident occurred Friday afternoon at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, famed for being one of the US’s biggest shopping complexes.

Eyewitnesses say a man approached the woman and her son, picked him up and tossed him over the edge. Eyewitnesses Brian Johnson told WCCO: ‘She was screaming “Everyone pray, everyone pray. Oh my God, my baby, someone threw him over the edge.”‘

An apparent family friend, named Selena, claimed be with the victim’s mother when she got a call about the horrific incident.

‘The boy who was thrown off the balcony at MOA today is the nephew of a good friend of mine. I was with her today when she received the call with the news. I’m not typically a praying person but if you are please say a prayer that he recovers. I don’t know what else to do,’ she tweeted.

‘Sometimes this world is too horrible to make sense of,’ she continued.

‘I am getting a report that someone threw the child over,’ one officer told dispatch, according to the Star Tribune.

Bystanders rushed to the boy who was seen falling from the balcony on the south side of the mall.

The child was reportedly not breathing.

Police say a man in his 60s tried to stop the suspect, but was assaulted.

The Mall of America was the biggest shopping complex in the US when it opened in 1992, with 555 stores.

It is now the country’s fifth biggest mall in terms of leasable space and 12th largest shopping center on Earth.

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