Malian woman gives birth to nine babies

A 25-year-old Malian woman who was told she was carrying seven babies has given birth to nine – two more than doctors had detected during scans.

Halima Cissé gave birth to the nonuplets in Morocco after Mali’s government flew her there for specialist care.

“I’m very happy,” her husband told the BBC. “My wife and the babies [five girls and four boys] are doing well.”

A woman who had eight babies in the US in 2009 holds the Guinness World Record for the most children delivered at a single birth to survive.

Two sets of nonuplets have previously been recorded – one born to a woman in Australia in 1971 and another to a woman in Malaysia in 1999 – but none of the babies survived more than a few days.

World record holder Nadya Suleman’s octuplets have grown up and are now 12 years old. She conceived them through in vitro fertilization.

Fanta Siby, Mali’s health minister, congratulated the medical teams in Mali and Morocco for the “happy outcome”.

Prof Youssef Alaoui, medical director of the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca where Ms Cissé gave birth, told the AFP news agency that the case was “extremely rare, it’s exceptional” – and a team of 10 doctors and 25 nurses had assisted at the delivery of the premature babies.