Man saws off own foot to avoid work

An unemployed Austrian man on Monday deliberately sliced off his left foot with a mechanical saw and threw it into an oven ahead of a health check on whether he was fit to work, police said.

When police arrived the "desperate" 56-year-old from Mitterlabill in southern Austria was still conscious but had lost a lot of blood, local police chief Franz Fasching told AFP.

He was airlifted to hospital in Graz where his condition was said to be stable.

The man had mounted the mitre saw on two stools in his boiler room using nails and removed the guard plate before slicing off the foot above the ankle and around 5:00 am (0300 GMT).

Emergency services "looked in the oven and were able to recover the foot ... The foot was taken the hospital but it was so badly burned that it cannot be sewn back on," Fasching said.