(Ighrane) Little Rayan who accidentally fell into a well in northern Morocco has died despite the relentless efforts of rescuers deployed for five days to extract this five-year-old child whose fate has moved the whole kingdom and well beyond.
Posted at 11:56
Updated at 4:16 p.m.
Shortly before 10 p.m. on Saturday, AFP journalists saw the father and mother, their faces defeated, enter a tunnel dug by rescuers and communicating with the well, from which the child was later released. .
They came out shortly after and drove off in an ambulance, without saying a word, the mother riding up front, her eyes staring into space. After a moment of confusion, the crowd, gathered for days, then dispersed in a mournful silence, AFP noted.
It was the royal cabinet that announced the death of the child about half an hour later. “Following the tragic accident that claimed the life of the child Rayan Oram, His Majesty King Mohammed VI called the parents of the deceased, who died after falling into a well,” he said in a statement.
“I am completely devastated,” reacted a user on Twitter.
It took five days for rescuers to reach the child, as they first had to drill a huge deep crevasse and then a horizontal tunnel. Their progress was greatly slowed down by the nature of the soil, some layers being rocky and others very sandy.
“Hero”
Around 8 p.m. Saturday, one of the many engineers mobilized to rescue the boy had predicted several hours of drilling, to cover the last 80 centimeters which separated the rescuers from the pocket where he was.
Rayan had accidentally fallen into the 32-meter dry well, narrow and difficult to access, dug near the family residence in the village of Ighrane, in the province of Chefchaouen, in the north of the kingdom.
Entering a horizontal breach on Saturday afternoon, the rescuers had continued their work centimeter by centimeter, digging by hand to avoid any landslide.
Saturday morning, a chief rescuer Abdelhadi Tamrani had indicated that images sent by an inspection camera showed the child “lying on his side, from behind” and that it was “impossible to say” if he was alive.
But the manager had assured to keep “very high hopes” that he was alive.
The rescuers had tried to send oxygen and water through tubes and bottles down to Rayan, without certainty that he could use them.
Thousands of sympathizers had rushed as a sign of solidarity and camped on the spot, in this mountainous area of the Rif, at nearly 700 meters above sea level.
In front of the tunnel, loud applause greeted each appearance of the drillers, including the volunteer Ali Sahraoui who dug with his hands in the last meters. This fifty-year-old has become a “hero” on social networks.
Metal barriers had to be set up on Friday to contain the crowd, also framed by a large device of auxiliary forces.
As the outcome approached, the curious regularly chanted “Allah Akbar” (God is the greatest) or sang religious songs.
Still full of hope, Rayan’s father had thanked Friday evening on television “all the people mobilized and those who support us in Morocco and elsewhere. »
#saverayan
Rayan’s fate has aroused a lot of sympathy on social networks around the world, from the Maghreb to Iraq, Yemen, Canada or the United States, in all languages.
“Millions of people around the world are holding their breath,” commented a user on Twitter.
Another raised his hat to the rescuers who had been fighting for a hundred hours: “They are the heroes of real life. When your own life does not count before a noble cause.
The hashtag #sauvezrayan continued to top the main Twitter trends in Morocco on Saturday.
This accident echoes a tragedy that occurred in early 2019 in Andalusia (Spain), where two-year-old Julen died after falling into a well 25 centimeters in diameter and more than 100 meters deep.
His body was found after 13 days of research on an exceptional scale.