Spain grieves after boy found dead
Totalán, Spain - Spain grieved on Saturday after a toddler who fell down a well was found dead in a tragic end to an intense 13-day rescue operation fraught with danger and setbacks.
Hundreds of engineers, police and miners had been working round-the-clock under the media glare to try to reach two year old Julen Rosello, who plunged down a narrow, illegal well on January 13 while his parents prepared lunch nearby in Totalán, a southern town near Malaga.
‘Unfortunately at 1:25am (0225 GMT) the rescue team reached the spot where they were looking for Julen and found the lifeless body of the little one’, the central government’s representative in the southern region of Andalusia, Alfonso Rodriguez Gomez de Celis, wrote on Twitter.
“Not another time, no,” shouted his father Jose when he heard the news, a witness said.
Julen’s parents lost another child, Oliver, aged three, in 2017. The child had cardiac problems.
Julen made a ‘free fall’ down to a depth of 71m when he hit a layer of earth, Gomez de Celis later said, adding that an investigation was underway to determine any ‘potential liabilities’ in the two year old’s death.
A hearse arrived at the mountain site shortly after the news broke to take his body to a funeral home, with psychologists at the side of Julen’s parents.
‘All of Spain feels the infinite sadness of Julen’s family. We have followed closely every step to reach him’, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote on Twitter, where the news was a trending topic. In a tweet, Spain’s King Felipe VI extended his ‘deepest condolences to Julen’s whole family’.
The Civil Guard police force, whose explosives experts had helped elite miners in digging a tunnel to reach Julen, tweeted a photo of an eye with tears pouring out. ‘Unfortunately, despite so much effort by so many people, it wasn’t possible...’, it wrote on its official account.
Spain had been riveted by the complex search-and-rescue operation, which was fraught with complications that caused delay upon delay as Julen’s distraught parents and relatives stood by.
It was ‘a colossal mission’, Gomez de Celis said on Saturday morning, that involved ‘moving 85,000 tonnes of earth in a brief space of time... with the obstacle course that the mountain was throwing at us’.
There had been no sign of life from the boy but rescuers believed they knew where he was inside the well.
All of Spain feels the infinite sadness of Julen’s family