Morocco’s king says boy, 5, trapped in deep well for days, has died
Rescuers pulled a boy out of a 100-foot well in Morocco on Saturday after tunneling toward the 5-year-old in a four-day operation that transfixed the country and anxious observers across the world, but the royal palace said in a statement that the boy had died.
King Mohammed VI called Rayan’s parents to express his condolences, the statement said. Reuters news agency also quoted two government officials saying the boy had died.
The emergency team’s extraction of the boy on Saturday night marked the end of a mission that involved teams of first responders and topographical engineers working round-the-clock with heavy equipment that included bulldozers and backhoes.
An ambulance took the child away as people prayed. The boy’s condition remained unclear for a brief period before local and regional media began reporting the palace’s statement that he had died.
The team had remained hopeful of getting Rayan out alive.
“It’s hard to determine his condition ... but there is great, great hope,” team member Abdelhadi Tamarani said earlier Saturday.
For four days, the team worked to safely retrieve Rayan, who fell into a dry well and became trapped between its narrow walls, in the village of Ighran in Morocco’s northern Chefchaouen province. The dramatic race to save him gripped Morocco and neighboring countries, with crowds gathering to join his parents and broadcasters livestreaming the efforts.
Rayan fell into the well Tuesday evening. The village contains numerous deep wells that provide irrigation for the cannabis crop that serves as the primary source of income formany in the remote region, the Associated Press reported.
The boy’s parents heard his voice and spotted him down the well with the help of a flashlight, according to Morocco World News. Unable to descend into the well themselves, emergency workers deployed bulldozers and began digging.
“It’s my well, and I was fixing it while Rayan was next to me,” the boy’s father told local outlet Le360 before the child was extracted.
Rayan’s grandmother told Agence France-Presse that the boy was “very loved here in the village” and not just at homeby his family.
Government spokesman Mustapha Baitas said soil conditions were too dangerous to try to widen the hole, Al Jazeera reported — necessitating major excavations around the well.
On Friday, the team began digging a horizontal tunnel with the help of topographical engineers as hundreds of people looked on. They manually chipped away the final stretch, local media said. The motors of heavy machinery stopped, and silence descended the scene.
The last few feet appeared to be the hardest, as the nerve-wracking prospect of a wall collapsing or shaking soil threatened days of delicate work. Rescuers peered over the edge of a pit the team had dug to reach the boy, watching for their colleagues to bring him out.