Doctors were stunned to find a toy battleship inside a little girl after they carried out an x-ray for her worried parents, who had spotted her choking.

The little girl’s parents brought her to the Ivano-Materninsky Children’s Hospital in Irkutsk, in Russia’s Irkutsk Oblast they saw her struggling to breathe on 21st May.

Suspecting she might have swallowed something while playing with a construction set, medics immediately took x-ray scans and were stunned to discover she had actually ingested an Aurora Russian Soviet Cruiser toy.

Her parents later told them that she was playing with the construction set when they noticed she started choking, prompting the doctors to take urgent action and perform an esophagogastroduodenoscopy.

The procedure, also known as EGD, uses a tube to examine the inside of the oesophagus, stomach, and duodenum.

Endoscopy specialist at the hospital, Dr Ilya Andreevich Pikalo said in a statement obtained by Newsflash: “We immediately noticed that the foreign body had sharp protruding parts that were hooking onto the walls of the esophagus and scratching it.

“The extraction of the ‘Aurora’ took twice as long as, for example, a regular coin.”

Pikalo said that after successfully completing the procedure, the child was kept in the hospital for further observation.

He added: “And the toy cruiser ‘Aurora’ took its place in the collection of foreign bodies of the endoscopy department.”