A man beat his 4-year-old daughter's head against the stone base of a Rome monument in front of tourists and a police officer, leaving the child in a coma, police said Sunday.

Carabinieri Lt. Col. Antonello Casarsa said the man, identified as Frenchman Julien Monnet, 37, repeatedly struck the head of his daughter, Luna, against the stone of the Altar of the Nation _ a towering monument to Italy's war victims in Rome's Piazza Venezia _ after a traffic officer asked to see some identification.

Bambino Gesu pediatric hospital said the child was comatose with severe head injuries when she was admitted shortly before midnight.

"Her condition is stable but very critical," Daniela Perrotta, from the hospital's anesthesia department, told reporters outside the hospital.

A Canadian tourist had told police the man was acting strangely toward the child.

"He was holding the child in an unhealthy way. The child was crying and screaming," the traffic officer, Anna Esposito, told Italian state TV.

When Esposito approached the man, she said, the man quickened his step, then said something she couldn't understand when she asked him what he was doing.

"He was holding the girl by her arm and then started striking her (head) against the stone," Esposito said, looking shaken. The Canadian grabbed the child, Esposito said, while she struggled to hold the man and called for reinforcements.

"He was like a furious beast," Esposito said. Continued...