A baby boy born with four arms and four legs is said to be recovering well after doctors performed surgery to remove his ‘parasitic twin’. Ugandan surgeons operated on three-month-old Paul Mukisa last month to move a wrongly-positioned heart and liver and remove six extra limbs belonging to an unborn twin.

And Paul’s parents Margaret Awino and Boniface Okongo say the child is now recovering well and is breastfeeding from his mother, after a successful operation at Mulago Hospital in Kampala.

‘The baby was given general anesthesia and the torso and trunk of the parasitic twin — which had two arms but no head or heart — was detached from the host baby,’ Dr Nasser Kakembo, who was part of the team operating on Paul, told CNN.

‘Then we also detached the lower limbs of the parasitic twin from the host, which included disarticulating the right and left lower limbs as they were attached by joints.

‘We controlled the bleeding and fashioned skin flaps to close the resulting wound.’

Margaret and Boniface, from Nabigingo village, were initially told there was nothing doctors could do when Paul was born with eight limbs and they rushed him to a nearby district hospital.

Fortunately, however, Dr John Sekabira, a consultant paediatric surgeon at Mulago Hospital, believed a successful procedure was possible, and discharged the baby to allow him to grow large enough to make the surgery safe.