HE sometimes walks from his Ang Mo Kio flat to a coffee shop nearby to have dinner with his girlfriend.

Two nights ago, Mr Alan Lim did the same - but this time he was alone.

As he stepped out from under the void deck of his flat in Block 604, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5, he was startled by a crash behind him.

'I literally jumped when I heard the crashing sound,' he said.

'I turned around to find that a window had fallen out and landed in the exact spot I was at just moments before.'

The window fell from a flat on the sixth storey of the block around 6.50 pm.

Mr Lim, 48, an insurance agent, is thankful his girlfriend was not with him then.

One of them could then have been hit by the falling window.

'She walks a bit slower than I do and if I had been walking with her, things may not have gone my way,' he explained.

The impact of the crash sent debris flying in all directions, with pieces of glass being found up to 5m from where the window landed.

Mr Lim said: 'The crash was so loud that people from the surrounding blocks heard it and were looking out of their windows to see what had happened.'

He added: 'I think that if the window had hit me I would have been seriously injured.'

Fortunately, Mr Lim was unharmed.

He said: 'I can't believe how lucky I am to have avoided the falling window and I didn't get hit by the debris either.'

The owner of the flat from which the window fell, a 41-year-old woman, was visibly shaken by the incident.

It just fell out

Said the woman, who refused to give her name: 'I just twisted the handle and pushed out the window like I normally do and to my horror it just fell out.'

She added: 'There was absolutely nothing I could do as the bars on the window grille prevented me from trying to grab the falling window.'

The woman said she was too terrified to even look out of the window to see if anyone had been hit.

'I just stood there and prayed that no one would get hurt. I was too scared to look or to go downstairs to check. I called the police once I regained my composure.'

According to her, the windows in the flat were installed in 2003 while she was renovating her flat. They have not been changed since then.

The woman said she had never before had any problems with the window.

'I close my windows every morning before I go to work and the first thing I do when I get home is to open them,' she said.

'I never would have expected to see it fall out like that.'

Around 8pm, two police officers were seen cordoning off the area and clearing the debris.

A police spokesman said the case is being referred to HDB, which will take over the investigation.

Naveen Kanagalingam, newsroom intern

This article was first published in The New Paper.