A SIXTEEN year old girl has fallen to her death from a tower block in Oxford.

The girl fell from the top floor of Hockmore Tower in Banjo Lane, Cowley, shortly before midnight last night.

Paramedics were called to the scene after reports that someone had fallen from one of the flats - but the girl was dead by the time they arrived.

Police are investigating the incident and are treating her death as "unexplained" although it is not thought to be suspicious.

David Kavanagh, 21, a neighbour of the dead girl, said he had seen her hanging from a ledge outside the ninth floor flat she is believed to have shared with her father for two to three years Mr Kavanagh said: "I was walking home and I could hear shouting. I looked up and saw a girl hanging by her arms.

"I ran upstairs to my parents and by the time I got there, she had gone."

His father Michael, 71, said: "The police came to interview us about what happened, it is terrible.

"David was very upset by what he saw."

The Kavanaghs' top floor flat at Hockmore Tower has a narrow ledge outside the front of their home which also runs alongside the flat where the girl lived.

Although there is meant to be no access to the ledge, it is accessible through bathroom windows.

A wooden barrier is in place at the edge and the flats overlook the top of the Temple Cowley Shopping Centre and the roofs of businesses and garages.

David Kavanagh, who demonstrated the weakness of the barriers to the Oxford Mail by gently kicking them to show the wood splintering, said: "They are just wooden and they don't seem very safe."

A spokesman for the south central Ambulance Service, which covers Oxfordshire, said an ambulance and two paramedics attended the scene after reports that a teenager had "jumped" from the tower block.

"On our arrival, the patient was deceased."