A week-long search ends happily: after 40 days, four children missing after a plane crash in the Colombian jungle have been found alive. “A joy for the whole country!” wrote President Petro.
More than a month after a small plane crashed in the Colombian rainforest, four surviving children have been rescued from the jungle.
After a week-long search in the Amazon region, emergency services found the siblings aged 13, 9 and 4 and a year in the south of the country, according to Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
“A joy for the whole country. The four children who have been missing in the Colombian rainforest for 40 days have been found alive,” wrote the head of state on Twitter. He also published a photo of soldiers and indigenous people in the jungle who fed and supplied the children with water.
left behind Items helped in the search
The siblings crashed on May 1 with a Cessna 206 propeller plane in the Caquetá department in the south of the country. Private small planes are often the only way to cover longer distances in the impassable region.
The children’s mother, the pilot and an indigenous leader died in the accident. While searching for the children, the soldiers found shoes, diapers, hair ties, purple scissors, a baby bottle, a shelter built from leaves and branches, and half-eaten fruit.
Using the objects and traces found, the soldiers were able to reconstruct the path the children had taken so far. The rainforest in the region is very dense, which made the search for the missing people much more difficult. In addition, it rains almost non-stop.
The children – three girls and a boy – are themselves part of an indigenous community, and their knowledge of the region may have helped them survive in the jungle after the crash.