Doctors have delivered a baby girl two days after her mother, a former ice skating champion, collapsed from a fatal brain haemorrhage.

Jayne Soliman was declared brain-dead but doctors managed to keep her heart beating until they had delivered her daughter, Aya Jayne, by Caesarean section.

Mrs Soliman, 41, was only 25 weeks pregnant when she collapsed in her bedroom at home in Bracknell, Berkshire, having gone to bed complaining of a headache. She was airlifted to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, but was pronounced brain-dead hours later, on Wednesday evening. Doctors said that she had suffered a haemorrhage caused by an aggressive tumour.

Mrs Soliman was given huge doses of steroids to help the unborn child’s lungs to develop. Two days later, Aya was born, weighing less than 2 lb 2 oz (about 1kg). She was transferred to the intensive care unit at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, where she remained last night.

David Phillips, 48, a close friend and fellow skater who was with Mrs Soliman at the hospital, said that her husband, Mahmoud Soliman, had had “the best and the worst day of his life”.

“It’s just something you can’t conceive – turning off your wife’s life-support machine and then going to see your newborn daughter.”

Mr Phillips’s wife, Lucine, 38, who was present at the delivery of Aya, said: “A midwife picked tiny Aya up and put her little face up to Jayne’s. It was just like welcoming any new baby into the world . . . but we also had to say goodbye to Jayne.”

Mr Soliman was unable to hold Aya immediately because she was in intensive care, Mrs Phillips said, but he was given a photograph of her: “I could tell from his face that he was overcome with emotion.”

Mahmoud Soliman said that his daughter had been named Aya after the Muslim word for miracle. “That is the name Jayne took when she became a Muslim and our daughter is also a miracle so I named her after her mum,” he said.

“She is so tiny, but she is a little fighter just like her mother.”

As Jayne Campbell, Mrs Soliman competed in numerous international skating galas during the 1980s. In 1989 she was the British professional champion as well as the No 7 in the world for professional free skating. She remained involved in the sport, moving to teach figure skating in Dubai, where she met her husband.

More than 300 mourners attended her funeral at the Jamia Masjid mosque in Reading on Saturday.

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