"I couldn't figure out how to carry on living, how to eat my breakfast when I saw this story on TV. He's a special child. When I saw the baby I said: 'I must adopt him, he has been sent to me by God'," the AC Ajaccio striker said.

The baby from Jinhua in the eastern province of Zhejiang “left the hospital on Wednesday evening in the care of his relatives”, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

His mother, grandparents and purported father will take care of him it cited local officials as saying, adding that the father plans to test his paternity.

The case of the child, dubbed “Baby No 59” by nurses after the number of his incubator, has sparked worldwide interest.

In China, there have been hundreds of thousands of comments on the country’s hugely popular weibos, services similar to Twitter, with users astonished by the circumstances and expressing good wishes for him.

The mother, 22 and unmarried, had kept her pregnancy a secret and gave birth unexpectedly when she went to the lavatory on Saturday.

The boy fell into the squat toilet and became stuck in a 10-centimetre (four-inch) tube, which firefighters and doctors spent nearly an hour taking apart before they could rescue him.

The 2.3-kilogram baby was trapped for at least two to three hours, authorities and media reports said previously.

He suffered some cuts to his face and limbs and was put in an incubator at the Pujiang People’s Hospital.

The mother will not be prosecuted as she did not drop the boy on purpose, a local police officer who declined to be named has said. Police had earlier said she had told her landlord about the baby, and was present throughout the rescue.

The mother “tried to grab the newborn before it fell into the toilet, but its body was too slippery”, Xinhua said, citing police records.