Colombia: Dog Wilson helped find missing children, now he is wanted

Lost four-legged friend
Tracker dog Wilson helped find the missing children in the Colombian jungle. Now 70 soldiers are looking for him

Search dog Wilson was instrumental in finding missing children after a plane crash in the jungles of Colombia. But the shepherd got lost. Now 70 soldiers are looking for the dog – and a country is rooting for it.

It sounds like a declaration of war: “We will not rest until we have found him!”. This is how the Colombian army put it on Twitter. After all, it’s about Wilson, the search dog who found the missing children after a plane crash in the jungle. He was the first to get to them, but on the way back to his handler he must have lost his way. That was on May 18th. More than a week ago, the two older sisters gave the military two pictures they had painted of Wilson, the search dog who had now disappeared. Lesly, 13, and Soleiny, 9, wanted to symbolically participate in the search for the Belgian shepherd, it said.

But despite this moral support, Wilson has so far remained missing.

According to the army, 70 special forces are deployed to find the five-year-old Belgian shepherd. The animal has now been gone for five weeks. However, the methods of the search differ from those of the search for the children. The search team released two dogs in heat hoping to lure in the castrated male, said Andrés Chaparro, a spokesman for the Colombian army. the “Washington Post”. The team also set up feeding stations for Wilson at strategic points and laid out his handler’s clothing so Wilson could smell the familiar scent.

Finding Wilson would be ‘great for Colombia’

“It was an honor for us that our dog helped find these children,” said ABC News Sergeant Luis Fernando Seña, commander of the dog school where Wilson spent 14 months in Bogota. “It would be great news for the country and for our children if he could be found.”

Sources: DPA, faz.net, Spiegel.de, Washington Post, ABC News .